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PROCUREMENT
How better procurement can save time, money and lives
Chris Slater, head of supplies and procurement at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and the trust’s e-business manager Graham Medwell, explain its pioneering work on e-enablement, inventory control, materials management and freeing up clinicians for frontline work.
B
ack in 2002, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust became the fi rst hospital in
Europe to trade electronically with its major suppliers through the Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX).
The trust has long been a leader on e-enablement for procurement and supplies, and its approach to the use of materials management, inventory management, e-catalogues, barcoding and tracking technology has released critical nursing and clinical time back to the frontline.
Managing the end-to-end supply chain
Head of supplies and procurement, Chris Slater, told NHE: “We’ve tried to move away from clinicians being involved in anything to do with ordering, replenishment and the supply chain. A materials manager in those areas can manage the end-to-end supply chain from re-ordering to receipting to putting away the products needed on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. That means we’ve released as much critical nursing time as possible back to frontline activities and taken those responsibilities away from clinicians.”
The trust has a non-pay annual spend of about £300m, of which £160m is controlled or infl uenced by Slater and his team within central procurement (the exceptions are pharmaceuticals and aspects of estate
28 | national health executive Nov/Dec 14
management). In total, the trust has 15,000 whole-time equivalent staff , 2,000 beds across fi ve sites (six including the Leeds Dental Institute), with a forecast 2014-15 turnover of just over £1bn.
Slater’s team includes about 15 people working in contracting and procurement, and e-business manager Graham Medwell’s team of fi ve. The materials management team includes a further 40-45 people who deal with the day-to-day supply chain issues across 59 active theatres and the roughly 320 departments and wards that are part of the materials management process.
Materials management
Slater said: “A number of organisations are now realising the benefi t of central materials management – it is being rolled out. If you look at the standard KPIs (key performance indicators) that the Department of Health has issued for procurement, it’s seen as best practice.”
Slater is clear that the increased digitisation of the supply chain and ordering process has benefi ts not just in terms of cost, but also with patient safety and risk management.
“Everybody initially thinks it’s all about price. Obviously price is in there – in terms of clean
ordering, accuracy of orders, making sure we’re asking for the right thing at the right time – but really this is very much about improved patient safety and product visibility down the line. It’s not just about the procurement, which is the front-end of the process.
“It is about being able to look at the whole supply chain through to our patients. If we start talking about product recall – for example, with the PIP implants a few years ago, [the NHS] didn’t really understand who had got what and it cost the supplier and the NHS and ultimately the patient a lot of aggravation and a lot of money.
“Whereas by linking the data through to the product, and tracking the product through to the patient using the barcode, we’ve got an end- to-end supply chain right through to patient level now. That’s the key driver: to ensure we’ve got a safe environment for the patient.”
AIDC in action
Tracking of products at Leeds is also possible via AIDC (automatic identifi cation and data capture) technologies like the WaveMark RFID ‘smart cabinets’, which count their own inventory levels.
Medwell said: “It means we know precisely where a lot or batch is located within the
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