Structure
There are seven Local Health Boards (LHBs) in Wales and three national NHS Trusts. Each LHB is responsible for delivering all NHS healthcare services within a geographical area. Three NHS Trusts, called 'all-Wales trusts', operate nationwide agencies and services. These are: the Welsh Ambulance Service, Velindre NHS Trust (providing a range of specialist services at local, regional and All Wales levels, including the Welsh Blood Service and specialist cancer services), and Public Health Wales.
The current Health Boards were created on 1 October 2009 following a reorganisation of NHS Wales that saw the abolition of 22 Local Health Boards (LHBs) and seven NHS Trusts that had existed since 2003. Since the reorganisation Health Boards are responsible for delivering all NHS services, rather than the two-tiered Trust and LHB system that existed previously.
Wales' largest teaching hospital, the University Hospital of Wales based in Cardiff is the largest hospital outside London and third largest in the United Kingdom.
Read more about this topic: NHS Wales
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in its totality, in its structure: posterity discovers it in the stones with which he built and with which other structures are subsequently built that are frequently better—and so, in the fact that that structure can be demolished and yet still possess value as material.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)