Tag Archives: health sector
The NHS Procurement Strategy – a nation (still) waits
So what’s happened to the UK’s National Health Service Procurement strategy? The story so far… (you might want to get a cup of coffee and settle down, this might be a long one). April 2012 At a conference in Manchester, the new NHS procurement strategy is going to be announced. Instead, the excellent Beth Loudon from Department of Health has to explain that top NHS management wanted more discussion with the market, and more “meat” in the strategy so there would be a delay whilst… May 2012 NHS appoints Sir Ian Carruthers to conduct a “call for evidence” to help [...]
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NHS Supply Chain – committed spend drives better value
We talked about the general progress and issues around the NHS Supply Chain operation, run by DHL, in part 1 here. Today we’ll dig into a couple of more specific initiatives. One successful idea has been the “capital trading fund”. This idea, developed by the Department of Health and DHL, saw DH providing initial funding so that DHL could go to the market with commitment and actually buy outright health capital equipment – items that they knew their customers were going to need, but for which they didn’t necessarily have firm orders. The results demonstrated what we probably would have [...]
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NHS Supply Chain – saving money for the health service with really, really big warehouses
I recently paid a visit to a really, really huge warehouse. Now let’s be honest, there are only so many things you can say when faced with this situation. “Wow, that’s a really huge warehouse” is probably the most obvious. “Isn’t it tidy and well organised”? That doesn’t apply in all cases, but certainly did in this case. “What a lot of tea-bags and washing up liquid” – now, that was one I didn’t quite expect. Because the NHS Supply Chain warehouse at Rugby operated by global logistics firm DHL is huge, certainly appears to be efficiently run, and does [...]
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UK Public Procurement – could health ideas inform procurement thinking? (Part 2)
(Here is part 2 of Dr Gordon Murray’s comparison of the recent UK Health Service report with what might be proposed for public procurement improvement – part 1 here). The NHS will see a super inspector introduced and challenging peer-reviews. The strange thing is that procurement capability reviews and IDeA Fitness Checks were stood down – perhaps they were set aside too early, or was it because there was insufficient attention paid to implementation of their recommendations? “[In the NHS] in order to expose failure, recognise excellence and incentivise improvement, the Chief Inspector will produce a single aggregated rating for [...]
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UK Public Procurement – could health ideas inform procurement thinking?
(We’re delighted to feature another guest post – in two parts – from Dr Gordon Murray, procurement practitioner, academic and commentator). On the 26 March the UK Health Minister outlined his response to the Francis Report; the investigation into healthcare failings at Mid Staffs hospitals. I have been watching some of the NHS discussions and, in parallel, following the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) Inquiry into Public Procurement. As I listened to the discussions on the Francis Report I had a vision of Bernard Jenkin (Chair of PASC) having coffee with the Health Secretary and each accidentally leaving with the [...]
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Managing conflicts of interest in UK health commissioning
We’ve got a very interesting guest post from Dr Gordon Murray coming this week on the UK’s health sector. But before that, we wanted to return to a point we’ve made before and that seems to be coming back into the news again. We wrote recently about the new health regulations and what they might mean for private sector involvement. But the issue of conflicts of interest amongst the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), who are making contracting decisions and awarding business to various providers both public and private sector, was picked up by the Sunday Times the other week. A [...]
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Digital Procurement strategies and NHS problems to come?
We featured our first guest post from Dr Gordon Murray earlier this week. He’s an academic, advisor, and now blogger, and he’s been excelling himself recently with some excellent and though provoking writing. I’m catching up a little with his recent work, so we’ll feature a couple of his pieces today and one more in greater detail later. He ranges widely and eruditely over the procurement landscape, as you’ll see from the breadth of the posts we’ll look at. In “Embracing digital procurement strategy”, he highlights the increasing money being spent by marketing folk in the area of social media. [...]
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Controversy over UK NHS commissioning / procurement
We wrote last week about the new UK Department of Health regulations that “clarify” how the commercial aspects of commissioning are supposed to work under the new Clinical Commissioning Group regime. Since then, there has been a growing swell of complaint and questioning from the media, stallholders and medical professionals.Indeed, that has now led the government to say they will review the regulations. I’m a little surprised at all the outcry because I always assumed the changes were going to have a major effect and were likely to open up the market to private providers. For instance, way back in [...]
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Down the Procurement Pub – a Friday Spend Matters Gossip
Imagine, it’s Friday lunchtime back in the days when everyone disappeared out of the office at 1pm on that day every week and didn’t come back. Yes, boys and girls, that was how British industry worked in the 1970s… So here are the sort of work related things we might have talked about (before we got onto football, music, etc)! _____________________ The latest newsletter from Science Warehouse – Leeds based eProcurement (P2P) software firm – is available here. There’s some good reading, and I particularly enjoyed James Hull, Development Manager with the firm, writing about “the rise of mobile procurement”. [...]
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UK Health Procurement / Commissioning – it’s complicated
To be honest, I’m struggling here. Help me out, kind readers in the UK Health sector. Comments and clarifications most welcome. The Department of Health has issued regulations and guidance that purport to clarify how new legislation will affect the way that commissioning of health services will work under the new regime of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). And although I thought I had a reasonable understanding of health commercial issues… I’m struggling. It seems to be emphasising a continuation of many of the regulations and ways of working we saw under the previous PCT set-up. But others – probably better [...]
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NHS Shared Business Services – were we wrong to be positive?
We wrote about the National Health Service Shared Business Services operation before Christmas, and also mentioned here that Howard Clark had published a very interesting critique of our analysis. I said we would analyse his analysis – so without wishing that this to become a Russian doll-like analysis of analysis of analysis, I did want to make a few points about his piece. The first thing to stress is that I’m no cheerleader of shared services. Anyone who reads us regularly should realise that we try hard to be independent and look at everything – whether it is technology, procurement [...]
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National Audit Office on NHS Efficiency – is it really a good news story?
Another of the pre-Christmas publications we didn’t get around to properly was the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) report on “Progress in making NHS efficiency savings”. (But before we get into that – can I point out an interesting health job that’s being advertised on our Spend Matters search4 procurement jobs website – Chief Procurement Officer to lead Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust in a “radical procurement transformation programme”. £80-100K and a genuinely fascinating and challenging role). Anyway, back to the NAO report. The Department of Health estimates that to keep pace with demand and live within its [...]
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NHS Shared Business Services – our series isn’t liked by everyone!
You may have read our series on the NHS Shared Services operation (SBS) that we published just before Christmas, following my visit to their centre in Leeds. (Here’s a link to the third and final part of it). Howard Clark, who also commented on our Cabinet Offices shared services piece yesterday, has published a very interesting critique of the SBS series here on his Calchas blog. He clearly comes at it from a very different angle to us, as he is critical of much of my analysis and comments, but it’s well worth reading to get a different perspective. For [...]
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Science Warehouse – heritage, hospitals and smart eProcurement
On a recent trip “up north” – and I speak as a Wearsider – I took the opportunity to visit Science Warehouse in Leeds. They’ve got office space in the “Half Roundhouse”, a listed Victorian steam engine shed, nicely converted to offices with exposed brickwork and high ceilings. they’ve been there for two years now, and the look and feel is of a typical smart software firm, whether we’re talking Chicago or Cleckheaton. Along with some other north-ish UK firms, (Wax Digital, Proactis, Due North, Software Europe), Science Warehouse fly the UK flag for eSourcing and eProcurement firms, up against [...]
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CEO steps down at Circle Healthcare – and how on earth did they get through the PQQ?
In the heat of the budget and West Coast Rail last week, the announcement that Ali Parsa, the founder and Chief Executive of Circle Healthcare, has stepped down as CEO and become a non-executive didn’t get as much focus as it might have. Circle are running the first National Health Service hospital to be “outsourced” to the private sector – Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire. We featured here various claims he made about procurement savings – and whilst some of the performance metrics seem to be moving in the right direction, the early financial results weren’t great. “Ali has a number of [...]
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Hospital purchasing – still major price differences, says new Ernst & Young report
Two years on from the National Audit Office report on how hospitals in England bought routine items, a new survey from Ernst &Young basically says that nothing has changed. The NAO found widely varying prices and guess what? So have Ernst & Young. This was all over the BBC this morning – although strangely I can’t find the actual report anywhere. “For this investigation, Ernst and Young looked at 10 NHS hospital trusts out of 166 – and found the prices paid for the same box of medical forceps ranged from £13 to £23. For an identical box of blankets [...]
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- US concern over UK military outsource – and chair procurement lands teacher in trouble : Trevor Black said: I could write a book on the level of commercial incompetence that exists in schools. It is... more
- US concern over UK military outsource – and chair procurement lands teacher in trouble : Paul Wright said: Peter, a friend and I noted the lack of commercial experience in the schools we are involv... more
- Procurement Leaders Awards – the winners! : Andrew Smith said: Was there anyone there who didn't get an award - that's a long list!... more
- Procurement Leaders Awards – the winners! : Robert Beveridge said: You procurement get a lot of fun don't you? Good to see Mars winning an award . They are p... more
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