A National Audit Office (NAO) report published today said that NHS hospitals in England could save around £500m a year if they improve the way they buy everyday supplies.
NHS hospitals in England spend around £4.6bn each year on a huge range of supplies and the study looked at how hospitals purchased 66,000 products, from nurses’ uniforms and bandages to paper clips. The conclusion is that the NHS as a whole spends almost half a billion pounds more of taxpayer money than it needs to. And that would make a big dent in the savings ministers say the NHS must make. Purchasing inefficiencies and small orders were the key culprits with price variations for the same items of between 10-50%!
The report also identified that in 61 trusts, 21 different types of A4 paper were purchased along with 652 different types of surgical and examination gloves.
The chair of the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge MP, said “The range of similar products that trusts buy is sometimes so wide as to appear ridiculous: how can it be, for instance, that while one trust does its work with just 13 different types of surgical glove, another requires 177?”
Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents the bulk of NHS Trusts in England, said it was a “challenging report which suggested there were some real opportunities to save money.”
With a coherent strategy to optimising costs and efficiencies, the scope for improvement in the NHS is clearly significant.