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MANAGEMENT
Inventory management for operating theatres
Operating theatre departments are an attractive test bed for inventory management technologies. Nicola Hall, managing director at Ingenica Solutions, explains.
In 2017, the focus to achieve better value and improved efficiencies in the NHS is ever greater; cutting costs, minimising wastage and improving productivity, are all common objectives that the sector strives to achieve. As a result, interest in inventory management has spiralled in recent years due to its compelling benefits, and as a pre-requisite for patient level costing information. Parallel to this, the healthcare sector has seen a rise in innovative technologies to facilitate improvements in the internal supply chain of a hospital; at the core of good supply chain practice is inventory management technologies that enable the management and control of goods in and out of a hospital – everything from a low cost box of tissues or surgical wipes to high value surgical implants.
There are a number of separate government strategies that also significantly impact how the tracking of supplies in and out of an operating theatre department is managed. This includes the e-Procurement Strategy, the adoption of the GS1 unique device identification (UDI) programme for track and trace capability, and associated patient line and service line costing. Inventory management and supply chain operations are fundamental to these requirements, and the Government has recognised the need for complete improvement and transformation of existing ways in which the NHS manages its supplies. Lord Carter’s report has also highlighted the need for Trusts to have a better grip on resources and costs.
Nicola Hall: “Locally, most Trusts suffer from a silo mentality.”
The biggest saving opportunity
In England alone, there are more than 3,000 operating theatres – which combined perform more than 10 million operations every year. Each operating theatre costs somewhere in the region of £1.5 million per annum to run – which highlights the sheer scope of potential savings for the NHS. That represents around half of the annual NHS spend.
In fact, the single biggest savings
In fact, the single biggest savings opportunity in hospitals across the UK is in operating theatres departments.
SEPTEMBER 2017
opportunity in hospitals across the UK is in operating theatre departments; they are the workhorse of a hospital and are one of the biggest spending areas in any Trust, so improving operational and financial performance here is crucial. Operating theatres, however, face tough challenges. Not only the necessity to balance increasing demands from a growing patient base, but also budgets being squeezed year-on-year. Greater value for money is of course essential, and recently to help achieve this, operating theatres have proved the natural test bed for inventory management systems. Indeed, it has been suggested that if it can work in theatres it would work anywhere. The operating theatre complexes often have significant challenges to overcome; the physicality of the areas can provide us with issues to resolve to achieve the desired outcome. As a largest area of spend, visibility of where the money is going and how it is spent is of vital interest to the finance and procurement teams. Inventory management and costing systems provide not only a new way of managing products to prevent costs, but
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