{"id":747941,"date":"2026-08-24T07:04:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T07:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/747941\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T07:04:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T07:04:34","slug":"health-service-in-northern-ireland-short-of-surgeons-and-staff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/747941\/","title":{"rendered":"Health service in Northern Ireland short of ‘surgeons and staff’"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, officials in the health service voiced their support for Nesbitt, <\/a>saying he had “offered strong political leadership” and had “listened to clinical leaders”.<\/p>\n

They included the Royal College of Surgeons, NI Confederation for Health and Social Care, the British Medical Association.<\/p>\n

Stormont’s health committee will convene later with departmental officials, including the department’s permanent secretary, following a request from committee’s chair, Sinn F\u00e9in MLA Philip McGuigan.<\/p>\n

McGuigan said the committee needed to know what decisions had to be made by any incoming minister.<\/p>\n

Analysis – BBC News NI health correspondent Marie-Louise Connolly:<\/p>\n

If you think of what happens in a week in the health service, the number of stories and issues \u2013 as health minister they are meant to know the inside out back to front of every issue. <\/p>\n

They are supposed to met the unions, clinicians, all the royal colleges, everyone who is involved in those stories and I think that’s something that Butler will not have the joy of doing due to the time pressures.<\/p>\n

He has a reputation of being very personable, popular and well-liked; but does being nice help you make decisions? And when he’s sitting facing the Royal College of Nurses and the general practice \u2013 what then?<\/p>\n

In an ideal world, the outgoing health minister Nesbitt would have left a letter for Butler saying: ‘Here’s what I’m leaving, all you have to do is follow my lead, we’re of the same party.’ <\/p>\n

But have they have left in those circumstances? And now in the mix we’ve got Burrows because of what happened at Causeway Hospital. <\/p>\n

So really there are three men in this relationship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, officials in the health service voiced their support for Nesbitt, saying he had “offered strong political…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":747942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-747941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}