PROCUREMENT
hospital. If you get a field notification relating to a safety aspect, you’re able to go directly to those products, instead of looking through thousands and thousands of products to try to find those lot and serial numbers. It’s more akin to a retail operation than healthcare, and a big time saving for the nursing staff.”
The trust has moved away from paper-based requisition processes. Slater said: “We’ve come up with a set of solutions, by using the barcode and by getting the staff to enter the barcode electronically, that mean we’ve managed to set up inventory management in all the major areas within the hospital now. So, effectively we’re able to scan the product, scan the patient and then everything in the background is electronic, based on order quantity re-order levels. Most of our major areas and specialities – trauma, spine, neuro-, orthopaedic, cath labs, radiology – are covered.”
That means that of the 25,000 different lines of products that the trust orders, multiplied by the number of times each is ordered, 94% are now electronic using barcodes or eDC through materials management.
“We believe that if an average nurse spends an hour per shift looking for products, trying to find products, re-ordering products, then we’ve saved about £19m of nursing time since 2002,” Slater said. “We’ve built up the accuracy of ordering so RMAs [return merchandise authorities, returning unwanted goods] are virtually non-existent now.”
These new processes have also enabled a reduction of 46% in the number of staff needed
to process forms and orders, saving the trust money for re-investment elsewhere.
Stock check
Each go-live with inventory management has revealed about 25-30% more stock than anticipated, Slater said, valued against the year-end stock check.
“That’s because stock is often squirreled away – put on top of cabinets, below cabinets – people don’t always count it in the proper way. So, importantly, we start to see better practice around stock control, returns and out-of-date stock.”
Once inventory management is in place, a clampdown on ordering tends to follow – although Slater admitted that can upset the account managers at the supplier companies, who see ordering patterns dropping in the short term.
“Take one area, trauma, within Leeds: we’ve got circa £1.5m of stock in there. Between going live in January 2010 and May 2014, the stock value went down by £434,000 – yet we’re still providing 99.9% availability on items the Major Trauma Centre department requires.”
Another example would be elective orthopaedic stock: since its go-live in August 2008, stock value is down by £424,000, while still providing availability levels of only just under 100%, and on a stock value of £1.8m plus consignment.
Automating the orthopaedic supply chain helped Leeds win the European Supply Chain
Excellence Award in 2009.
Slater said: “In total, we control circa £12m worth of inventory through automated inventory management: that doesn’t include the materials management that’s going through barcoding.”
A complete roll-out will take another three to five years, he said, though he added that the trust would reach a point of diminishing returns based on product value. “Very simplistically, if an item costs below £25, in my view you don’t need to be controlling that through formalised inventory [management]. But until we get to that level, where we’ve got concentration of product and value, we’ll continue rolling this out.”
Transparent processes
Medwell explained that the cataloguing of products via the GHX Nexus data repository (which contains the trust’s catalogue information with secure shared access for both them and their suppliers) also includes lots of information about the attributes and specifications for each product, similar to the retail sector.
“It’s all so transparent,” he said. “Within the NHS, you can see the products that are actually being used, because you’re scanning the patient and then scanning the product into the system. We’re also able to look at products excluded from the national tariff, and possibly be able to claim back the cost of those products after tracking their use through to patients and Continued overleaf >
national health executive Nov/Dec 14 | 29
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