NHS Trusts wait on the impact of the new medical supplies supply chain guidelines.
On the 23rd May the NHS new supply chain strategic sources guidelines were announced
Key themes included, cutting medical supplies costs, the issue of trailer fill an effort to try and limit the amount of miles that supplies travel to their destination and optimising the supply chain itself.
The strategic sourcing program is an attempt to overhaul the entire NHS supply chain which affects not only the end user trusts but also how the NHS supply system runs as a business and interacts with manufacturers.
Early wins for the program include the redesigning the packaging of medical waste containers, NHS supply chain worked with the manufacturer to reduce packaging. Jonathan Kay
Head of strategic sourcing at NHS supply chain cited a 63% reduction in packaging and transportation costs, with an additional reduction of 46 tonnes of paper used.
Medical supplies and equipment for hospitals are a crucial part of every trusts yearly financial budget. In the early days of NHS care hospitals required a limited range of equipment and supplies.
The advances in technology over the past 50 years have added new forms and types of medical supplies available to hospitals.
NHS trust managers need to have clear grasp of the financial requirements of each department when creating and assigning their medical supplies budget.
Many factors go into the budgets, external targets, patient numbers amongst others. Jeremy Hunt the coalition minister for the NHS targeted savings in medical procurement.
The Office of National Statistics targeted large savings could be achieved via better medical supplies and equipment procurement among the NHS trusts.
Any reader employed in a trust will understand how contentious this subject is as years of restrictive practices and where applicable and warranted tightly legislated medical supplies, have kept NHS budgets effectively ring fenced and subservient to tightly controlled buying groups.
Medical Supermarket welcomes any move that will increase the ability of NHS trusts to aggressively and effectively source the best pricing from a range of suppliers.
More guidance is needed to identify areas where NHS trusts can have greater freedom in purchasing medical supplies to achieve greater freedom.
In February of this year Adam Bradshaw gave some great insights into the problems faced by NHS trusts with medical supplies procurement. He identified instances where high volume non critical supplies are an issue. in his example one hospital uses 179 varieties of surgical gloves whilst another uses just 13.
Surgical gloves are in use on a massive scale everyday within the NHS, there is need for specialist products to complete specialist tasks but a scale of 179 different types is an indicator of high inefficiencies.
This type of medical supplies procurement activity will cause additional cost problems such as multiple invoicing from different suppliers and potentially from different manufacturers.
After successful careers in high level medical procurement we decided that the Medical Supermarket solution would offer purchasers a single invoice system to track all medical supplies ordered. We also work closely with clients to advise on their internal systems and mechanisms for ordering supplies.
This has resulted in excellent savings for our GP clients on average the efficiency saving window by using Medical Supermarket is between 20-30% per client.
We would welcome the opportunity to work with NHS trusts to help deliver cost efficiencies for everyday medical supplies such as surgical gloves.
Our business succeeds by saving the end user (our clients) money. Greater flexibility for NHS trusts when dealing with medical supplies procurement means we can help the NHS save more.
Other useful resources
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=21990
Image from The Daily Telegraph
