But Hunt asks: Why are hospitals spending £16 on gloves worth 35p?
HOSPITALS are spending up to 47 times over the odds for stethoscopes, plasters and gloves, Jeremy Hunt has warned.
The Health Secretary said there was a ‘baffling variation’ between the prices paid by hospitals for the same equipment.
From this week, hospitals will be ranked in a league table based on whether they are paying over the odds for everyday products.
They will be classed as either ‘exceeds expectation’, ‘meets expectation’ or ‘below expectation’ – on the basis of how much they are paying compared with similar-sized trusts.
To compile the data, Department of Health officials have been scrutinising how much trusts are paying for the same equipment.
They found one trust spent £16.47 on a pack of 12 rubber gloves that cost another trust just 35p – a 47-fold difference.
Another paid £21.76 for a box of 100 adhesive plasters which a different trust bought for £1.68. A ‘Littmann Classic II’ stethoscope, meanwhile, cost £90 at one trust yet another managed to buy it for just £26.78.
And a single bedding set was bought by one hospital for £16.99 and another for £4.16. Mr Hunt said initial savings from buying cheaper products could be £300million a year, rising to £1billion a year by 2021 if all trusts properly negotiated their costs.
‘We think that there are potential savings on procurement of around a £1 billion a year,’ the Health Secretary said.
‘We are discovering for example you could have two trusts next door to each other and when it comes to a pair of surgical gloves one of them is paying £1.27 a pair and next door they are only 50p a pair.
‘Or you could have a box of 100 syringes which one trust will be paying £12 for and next door they are only paying £4.’
He added that some trusts were just looking up items on Google and buying the first one they found, without comparing prices. In other cases suppliers were charging trusts thousands of pounds more for the same products because they did not bother trying to negotiate.
In a speech to the NHS Providers conference in Birmingham, Mr Hunt said: ‘The NHS is rightly recognised as one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world and I am immensely grateful for your efforts to clamp down on unnecessary waste.
‘But we must not be complacent when there is still baffling variation in the prices that hospitals are paying for supplies, with many paying over the odds for the same products sold more cheaply at a neighbouring trust.
‘We want to support the NHS to save money wherever possible so it can be reinvested into frontline services making sure taxpayers get the best value from the Government’s investment in the NHS.’
The league table, on the NHS Improvement website, gives each trust a figure for how much money they could save by negotiating prices.
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust Manchester was ranked at the top, followed by University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire, and Bradford Teaching Hospitals.
The worst five trusts were Ipswich, Gateshead Health, Wye Valley, Chelsea and Westminster, and North Middlesex University Hospital. Department of Health officials calculated that these five trusts could save £11million between them by buying cheaper equipment.