NHS procurement drive ‘to save £1.5 billion’
pharmafile | August 5, 2013 | News story | Sales and Marketing | NHS, UK, procurement
A blueprint for saving the NHS £1.5 billion has been launched by the government in a bid to ensure that procurement becomes more consistent and to ‘cut wasteful NHS spending’.
Health minister Dr Dan Poulter insisted the way the NHS buys “everything from rubber gloves and stitches to new hips, building work, bed pans and temporary staff” at present is ‘scandalous’.
“Hospitals must wake up to the potential to make big savings and radically change the way they buy supplies, goods, services and how they manage their estates,” he said.
The government claims its controversial NHS reforms “are already making £1.5 billion of back office savings each and every year for our NHS by reducing unnecessary bureaucracy”.
The document – ‘Better Procurement, Better Value, Better Care: A Procurement Development Programme for the NHS’ – says it is now possible to save another £1.5 billion which could “be spent on frontline patient care”.
The government wants:
- an NHS ‘procurement champion’ with private sector expertise to be recruited
- Poulter to lead a team, drawn from government, the NHS and business to work with this person
- to force hospitals to publish for the first time what they pay for goods and services
- to cut the £2.4 billion annual temporary staff bill by 25% per cent by the end of 2016
- the Department of Health to work with NHS suppliers directly to strike bulk deals for medical equipment like radiotherapy machines and MRI scanners
- to improve support given to senior NHS staff to better understand procurement.
The government says it has “already saved £3.8 billion by changing the way it buys goods and services, and enforcing sensible controls on recruitment and use of consultants”.
However, procurement has been a hot-button issue for opponents of the government’s NHS restructure, with concerns voiced earlier this year that compulsory competitive tendering may be forced on doctors to the detriment of patients.
Health minister Norman Lamb told MPs that part of the Health and Social Care Act would be rewritten to avoid ‘misinterpretation’, after GPs and royal colleges put pressure on the government to change the way section 75 of the controversial legislation had been drafted.
Introduced in February, the disputed lines in the National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) Regulations said commissioners can only award a contract without competition if they are “satisfied that the services to which the contract relates are capable of being provided only by that provider”.
National Voices, a coalition of 130 health and social care charities, said the regulations as they stood would have had “the effect of enforcing an NHS commissioning system based almost exclusively on competition”.
Critics argued that the wording meant that most NHS services would be open to competition from private companies – a sea-change that ministers had gone out of their way to deny as the controversial Act made its way through Parliament.
Adam Hill
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