With the NHS spending over £20 billion annually on goods and services – accounting, typically, for around 30 per cent of each hospital’s operating costs – but, in the view of Health Minister, Dr Dan Poulter MP, still ‘failing to harness its enormous purchasing power’.
The Minister recently unveiled a new Procurement Development Programme for the service, (HEJ – September 2013) the goal being to help NHS Trusts ‘find’ over £1.5 billion of ‘procurement efficiencies’ over the next three years. HEJ reports.
Describing the new Programme, which was launched on 5 August, as ‘a radical new blueprint for how our 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 his own Foreword to the lengthy and detailed launch document, Better Procurement, Better Value, Better Care: A Procurement Development Programme for the NHS (downloadable at www.tinyurl.com/kbkl6su), Dr Poulter was no less effusive when he said that, while the Government’s NHS reforms were already making £1.5 billion of back office savings annually for the NHS ‘by reducing unnecessary bureaucracy’, the new strategy would ‘show how our NHS can save much more, and support economic growth, by changing the way it buys supplies and does business’.
Spending available funds ‘much more wisely’
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
