Barts Health procurement team among the best in the country
The HSJ billed the story as the NHS Trusts failing to meet national efficiency targets. But in fact, Barts Health is one of the good guys, among a minority of providers judged to be delivering value for money for patients and taxpayers.
A leaked copy of a league table collated by NHS Improvement shows us rated 16th in the country for efficiency in buying goods and services.
This means we are among only 18 Trusts (out of 133 in all) who are meeting the three key standards devised by Lord Carter’s national review of hospital productivity.
Lord Carter estimated the NHS could save hundreds of millions of pounds a year through adopting more efficient procedures and better controlling their spending.
The leaked league table showed we scored 85.5% overall against a weighted scorecard that took account of a dozen different metrics.
However, on the basis of answers to FOI requests, HSJ highlighted our performance against other acute Trusts on the three key standards. This analysis showed 93.8% of our spending was on goods in catalogues (compared to a target of 80%); 96.7% of spending was with electronic purchasing orders (target 90%); and 90.2% of spending was under contracts (target 90%).
Alwen Williams, chief executive, thanked Lucie Jaggar and the procurement team for engaging with hospitals and clinical teams to achieve such a positive outcome.
NHSI has now published an official league table but it does not rank providers in order or show the level of detail that HSJ saw. Nevertheless, Barts Health is in the top 25% of providers, both on procurement process efficiency and purchase price performance.
Lucie Jaggar, director of procurement, said: “This performance represents a huge effort across all of #TeamBartsHealth - from the hundreds of staff who correctly follow our purchase order process, through our accounts payable team who process all the invoices, to all the clinical colleagues who have helped us standardise our product ranges by the efficient use of catalogues for ordering supplies.”