Following on from our last post on The Procurement Pandemic, the NHS finds itself at the centre of a storm again this morning with the publication of a National Audit Office (NAO) report that concludes more efficient purchasing could save hospitals £500m on basic supplies.

The NAO report is confirmation of what many of us have long known; if hospitals worked together on purchasing, millions could be saved without making any changes to front line health provision. The disjointed nature of purchasing and lack of visibility into spending patterns however is holding back this most obvious route to deficit repair.

The report highlights the huge variation in what hospitals buy and what they spend on operational purchases. It’s clear that the current system offers far too much choice and quite frankly, choice is a luxury we can no longer afford − the financial impact of contract overlap isvastly underestimated.

In the case of the NHS, too much choice has resulted in the existence of hundreds of individual non critical purchase contracts. Each contract dilutes the service’s collective ability to save money and forces it down a route which, instead of leading to best value, leads to a dead end.

The only answer to the complex, but by no means insurmountable problem of wasteful health sector procurement lies in joining up purchasing power and procurement excellence across the NHS through simplifying contracts and implementing the right technology. It’s an approach that’s already yielding the right results for forward-thinking trusts, like County Durham and Darlington and it offers a model which is ripe for replication on a national scale.