With the NHS spending over £20 bn annually on goods and services – accounting for some 30% of each hospital’s operating costs – but, in the view of Health Minister, Dr Dan Poulter MP, the NHS still ‘failing to harness its enormous purchasing power’.
The Minister last month unveiled a new NHS procurement development programme, the goal of which he said would be to help NHS Trusts ‘find’ over £1.5 bn of procurement efficiencies over the next three years. Describing the programme, which was launched on 5 August, as ‘a radical new blueprint for how the NHS buys everything – from rubber gloves and stitches, to new hips, building work, bed pans, and temporary staff’, the Department of Health (DH) said it would ‘radically change what our NHS does with its money, by cutting wasteful spending’. In unveiling Better Procurement, Better Value, Better Care: A Procurement Development Programme for the NHS (available at http://tinyurl.com/kbkl6su), the DH said the Government’s NHS reforms were already making £1.5 billion of back office savings annually for the service ‘by reducing unnecessary bureaucracy’. However, the new programme would ‘show how our NHS can save much more, and support economic growth, by changing the way it buys supplies and does business’. Dr Poulter said: “The Government is putting an extra £12.7 bn into our NHS, but that money needs to be spent much more wisely by local hospitals, who must wake up to the potential to make big savings, and radically change the way they buy supplies, goods, and services, and how they manage their estates. “We must end the scandalous situation where one hospital spends hundreds of thousands more than another, just down the road, on something as simple as rubber gloves or syringes, simply because they haven’t got the right systems in place to ensure value for money for local patients. This kind of poor resource management cannot continue.” The new publication ‘takes an open and frank look at the procurement inefficiencies that currently exist in our NHS’. The DH said: “Findings show there is little consistency in the way our NHS spends money, and that very few senior people in NHS hospitals know what good procurement looks like. There is also an over reliance on ‘framework agreements’, at the expense of the NHS striking radical money-saving deals, such as hospitals getting together to bulk-buy equipment for a discount.” One of the key ‘actions’ set out in the new strategy will be the recruitment, to start shortly, of a new NHS ‘procurement champion’ with private sector expertise, ‘with the authority to drive better procurement practices across the whole of the NHS’.
