The 'National Mask Stockpile' and other NHS farces

Last week, the NHS banned trusts from sourcing their own PPE because they were seen to be competing for the same vital gear. But procurement chiefs have complained that they have since been sent Chinese-made masks from the national stockpile that do not effectively repel fluid.

I’m almost beyond words. If you gave these numpties the job of designing the internet they’d pick a single hub and spoke layout – with the hub in Whitehall and every computer in the land connecting through it.

The NHS has some 4,000 staff engaged in procurement. They used to be called buyers in the old days, just as human resource directors used to be called personnel managers. Both branches have been captured by (H/T Discovered Joys) the clerisy, as HSJ describes -

The new game in town is called the “procurement target operating model”, and is being run by NHS Improvement with the help of Deloitte and a small selection of NHS procurement staff…..

By far the most important take-away from the blueprint is the vision that national teams will lead on creating strategies for each of the categories covered by the model.

This appears to be a similar tack to the recent changes to NHS Supply Chain, where specialist procurement organisations are tasked with buying products on behalf of the NHS across 11 categories.

The document states “integrated category and market management teams” will be the “driving force for procurement activity across the NHS. They will own and develop a single approach to each spend category to leverage economies of scale and drive market innovation”.

It appears the actual procurement will be done by “consolidated operational procurement delivery teams”, which will “implement the central category strategy at the local level, manage operational buying and undertake low-value sourcing initiatives/reactive buying”.

What it actually means is that even more of the spend by NHS trusts will be managed and directed by central NHS procurement actors – not even employed by the NHS, necessarily, but specialist organisations like, erm, Deloitte. They will extend their grasp into areas such as agency staffing, facilities management, patient transport and clinical waste to add to the ‘NHS supply change national supply category’ which they already own.

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s this. What big national procurement teams want to do is to let big high value national contracts for which only big global firms can bid, crowding out SMEs, local businesses and domestic suppliers. It really, really doesn’t ‘create value’.

And as events of the past weeks have shown, these jargon-choked central procurement teams may talk a good game, but when it comes to getting on the phones and buying essential kit at short notice, being agile, effective, and pragmatic and able to act with alacrity – critical procurement skills in a crisis – they’re utterly crap. Like those Turkish gowns they bought, they’re not fit for purpose.