The Procurement function manage all sourcing and purchasing requirements for our customers, managing Trust spend to ensure the “5 rights” of procurement are achieved:

  • Right Quality

  • Right Quantity

  • Right Place

  • Right Time

  • Right Price
     

Our sourcing and purchasing cycles can be summarised as follows:

Sourcing

  • Understand requirements and specify

  • Category analysis

  • Develop strategy

  • Tender

  • Execute agreement
     

Purchase to Pay

  • Analyse requirements

  • Requisition

  • Order

  • Receive

  • Match & pay

 

Aims & Goals

Quality, value for money and - most importantly - patient care are at the core of everything we do.  Our sourcing and purchase to pay processes are underpinned by our governance and stakeholder engagement processes.  The team operates a dedicated category management approach to ensure in depth expertise on all spend we manage.  This ensures:

  • Compliance with Trust Standing Financial Instructions (SFI's) and the Procurement Act 2023

  • Consistent delivery of savings year on year 

  • Collaboration on projects across the Lancashire and South Cumbria health economy

  • Access to quality management information to aid informing decision making

  • We systemically challenge and reduce unwarranted variation
     

The One LSC Procurement team work closely in collaboration with procurement partner organisations including NHS Supply Chain.

The Logistics & Supply Chai function is critical to a high-performing NHS Trust. Having the right stock level, of the right product, means the Trust can perform the necessary procedures, without holding unnecessary products and negatively impacting cash flow; meaning both operational and financial targets can be met. Good supply chain management practices minimise inventory and costs of inventory ownership whilst maximising inventory availability for consumers.

The Materials Management service will provide a top up replenishment service on all consumable items by providing the ward/department with a regular order and putting away of goods  to replenish stock to agreed levels. We also provide an enhanced service in some key departments eg. Theatres. Providing a daily top up service of all items whilst managing numerous other stock issues such as, procedure specific picking process to further release clinical time, and Inventory scanning in line with the Scan4Safety initiative. We are pushing forward our processes daily by implementation of a dynamic inventory management system in line with the Scan4safety initiative.

The Logistics service ensures a receipt and distribution of all items to the Trust and subsequent timely delivery to location required. Furthermore we are pushing forward our processes daily by implementation of dynamic inventory management systems in line with the Scan4safety initiative.

Aims & Goals

  • To ensure that the Trust operates in line with its Standard Financial Instructions covering all aspects of stock management of goods.

  • To drive up standards and improve performance of procurement in line with Lord Carter’s report.

  • To protect the Trust and minimise risks through means of appropriate managerial arrangements.

  • To obtain value for money while providing the best service.

  • To ensure the Trust’s approach to inventory management provides the maximum benefit in terms of requisitioning, shrinkage, waste, disposals and product recalls.

  • To provide standardisation of goods and traceability of usage.

  • To improve patient care by ensuring all goods used are fit for purpose and meet quality standards.

  • To ensure products are available for treatment of patients with minimal clinical effort.

  • To drive towards compliancy to Scan4Safety initiative.

Scan4Safety

Scan4Safety is a pioneering initiative that is enabling the delivery of better patient care, improved clinical productivity and supply chain efficiency in the NHS.  It has also been identified as a key objective within the Carter report. The DOH states “Effective operational performance and management hinges on information. Scan4Safety has provided leading NHS trusts with data that now underpins better decision making and improved operational performance”

This relies on using GS1 and PEPPOL standards to identify every Product, Patient, Place, and Process:

  • Patient - Improving safety, improving care.

  • Place - Everything trackable, everything traceable

  • Product - Everything recorded, everything accounted for

  • Process - Simplifying processes, releasing time to care

 

We aim to progress the deployment of a Scan4Safety with Inventory management system within all our Trust which would allow us, using the procedure list process, to associate product to patient, providing tracking and traceability of all consumable and implanted items. The basis of any system requires identification, barcoding and control of inventory which are all precursors to starting and delivering Scan4Safety.  Ultimately the implementation of the system and associated financial controls will allow the Trusts to not only meet its mandated requirements but to develop patient level costing on the real time basis utilising the functionality of procedure cards.

The Procurement Support Unit (PSU) provides a requisition processing service, end user training and a single point of contact for end user queries. 

All non-stock requisitions raised across the region are dropped into a requisition pool and are then processed by a member of the PSU team ensuring compliance against four key areas:

  • Trust SFI's & Legislation

  • Data Quality

  • Buying Route

  • Turnaround Time

A range of resources are available in the P2P System section of this member however the PSU team are available to help with any system training issues or questions. 

The Data & Systems team works with with all stakeholders to develop and administer database systems and be responsible for providing customer and supplier insight, business intelligence and data reporting and analysis services to a range of internal and external stakeholders. 

  • To act as system administrator for the Trusts purchasing data bases ensuring data integrity and hygiene through overall management and supervision of the system.
  • To manage and implement annual upgrades of database systems in the organisation, creating testing plans which ensure thorough testing of all parts of the system, including custom reports 
  • To liaise with internal & external IT provider to coordinate changes a timely and efficient manner.
  • To proactively support and develop the Trusts purchasing data bases to ensure that the LPC obtains maximum benefit from the software by liaising with key stakeholders across all teams that utilise the data & reports
  • To maintain, develop and create reports and develop tools and training in order to give users appropriate on-demand / self-service access to data 
  • To provide data analysis to the Purchasing Team and other internal colleagues in order to support campaigns, statutory information requests and organisational insight. 
  • To create bespoke queries of the database as required in order to fulfil one off information requests.