So what are peoples thoughts and any potential impact on yourself

[Phil Pascoe]

My friend, a buyer for a hospital pays £16 for a screwdriver bit that's 99p in town. The only difference is it would need to be sterilised (other items being sterilised at the same time), but it's a single use item. He buys dozens at a time and has to buy from an approved supplier. It stinks of brown envelopes.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Aspirin and paracetamol are the same - the hospitals pay up to five or six times the supermarket prices.

 

[woodieallen]

where I live it's a 12 mile round trip to town but still find your comment offensive

Fair enough and if you're also a pensioner then I can accept that.

 

[Terry - Somerset]

Indeed, very droll.
But what do the prices look like? You have to be a registered user to see them.
I hear stories from people who work within the NHS that the sort of ridiculous prices I referred to are commonplace, like £250 for a four legged wheeled stand for a drip bag.
So, if that is true, then it looks like whoever determines value for money needs to get a grip.
Purely anecdotal I know, so make of it what you will, but when my dad was in hospital a couple of years ago there weren't enough Zimmer frames for each patient who needed one. If he wanted to go to the toilet he had to ask for a member of staff to get him one. When I queried this with the ward sister I was told it was down to cost.
They could only buy them from an approved supplier, and, whilst I can't recall the actual price, it was a lot more than I had paid for the one he had at home. She had a real bee in her bonnet about it, and maintained that this was true of many things. She was clearly very frustrated by it.
When he passed away I left his own one on the ward.

Whilst central buying may be a route to cost saving, it does not always work as intended.

One public sector body had a central contract for all office supplies. Satellite offices needed to complete a requisition for each item needed, then despatched from a central stores.

The benefit of a lower product cost and proven financial control was overwhelmed by additional process and postage costs. Cheaper by far to allow each office to buy at their discretion from the local office supplies vendor (then Rymans, Office World etc).

Central procurement in the public sector brings another challenge - getting agreement to the solution. Cue working groups to agree specification, colour, design, warranty etc etc etc.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee. A bed, drip stand, heart monitor, drugs trolley etc may end up over-engineered, unnecessarily complex and costly through pandering to individual opinions of numerous hospital trusts, each with an idiosyncratic view of what is right.

 

[Spectric]

Ok this has not gone to plan and it has strayed all over the show, I did say that it needs to be kept on track and the topic was the impact of the budget on us and not from every other possible angle and nothing political, people have brought certain parties into the topic which are political so it is that time.