NHS ‘has lost trust in its £8bn supply chain’

THE NHS’s central purchasing body has been left to “mark its own homework” due to “weak oversight” from health bosses, MPs have said.

The health service spends around £8 billion a year on paper, gloves, prosthetic hips and other medical equipment.

The NHS Supply Chain – a central procurement body – sources, buys and supplies equipment and consumables to hospital trusts. It has a catalogue of more than 600,000 products.

A report by the Public Accounts Committee of MPs highlights how the supply chain was created to help the service make the most of collective buying power. But MPs said it had “so far failed to demonstrate it is the answer the NHS needs”.

Hospitals are still spending £3.4 billion a year independently, outside collective purchasing.

The committee said the NHS Supply Chain had “failed to persuade trusts to use it, meaning trusts are missing out on opportunities for savings”.

MPs on the committee said NHS England had been “weak in its oversight and support of the NHS Supply Chain”, likening savings claims made by the chain as “effectively marking its own homework”.

The organisation reported it helped the service make savings of £3.3bn from 2016/17 to 2022/23.

But MPs on the committee said hospital trusts “do not always recognise the savings the NHS Supply Chain reports, causing mistrust and frustration”.

The Public Accounts Committee said the supply chain needed to do more to get trusts on board as satisfaction with the service was in “steady decline”.

Dame Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the committee, said: “Given the scale of the NHS’s billions of pounds’ worth of collective spend on procurement, ensuring the best value for money for the taxpayer is essential.

"But our report finds that trusts do not have the requisite confidence in the NHS Supply Chain to utilise its services, leaving it at risk of being an answer to a question no one is asking.”

THE crisis in the NHS should be used as an opportunity to overhaul all facets of the healthcare system in England. That includes how the NHS purchases items required for administering medical care.

This is highlighted by the MPs report into the NHS’s central purchasing body. The very fact that it has been left to “mark its own homework” as a result of weak oversight, according to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will make patients feel uneasy.

Especially when many patients are facing delays for operations or lining the corridors of A&E to be seen following an emergency.

The health service spends around £8bn every year buying items such as paper, gloves, prosthetic hips and other medical equipment. The NHS Supply Chain sources, buys and supplies medical equipment and consumables to hospital trusts.

But hospitals are still spending £3.4bn a year independently, outside of the collective purchasing route.

NHS Supply Chain has “failed to persuade trusts to use it, meaning trusts are missing out on opportunities for savings”, the PAC says.

For all the good that the NHS does, it is an organisation that suffers from a never ending labyrinth of red tape and bureaucracy.

At a time when the NHS is facing budgetary pressures like no other, a review is needed into how efficient parts of the health service are.

No one wants to see the quality of care suffer but governments can’t continue to service the NHS’s ever-growing costs without demanding absolute efficiency.

In January, the National Audit Office said that the NHS is “not using its spending power to the full” in its own analysis of NHS Supply Chain.

Given the scale of the NHS, it should be able to leverage its collective spending power to get value for money.