Michael Pace shares NHS LPP’s three year vision

Michael Pace, Managing Director shares NHS LPP’s three year vision. As we’ve begun a new financial year, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss what procurement should look like in the near future – focusing on the product/service life cycle, procurement becoming more strategic, sustainability and social value and the importance of collaboration.

Whole product life cycle and procurement becoming more strategic
Procurement is a key strategic function within an organisation and it’s vital that procurement gets involved at the beginning and not just at the end of the buying process. The pandemic has given us a real opportunity to look at how we can enhance the service procurement professionals provide.

NHS Procurement taking a more strategic role, will support the whole patient journey and move the conversation on from price - to put our patients at the heart of what we procure - either in terms of product or service. This may not lead to the traditional in year savings, but it is important to look at whole life costs and system savings. It may be right to buy a more expensive product if the patient recovers more quickly and is not in a hospital bed for so long. These types of savings need to be recognised to allow more innovation within the system and help us to become a better customer to our suppliers.

Sustainability and social value
Sustainability and social value is a critical agenda topic for the NHS – highlighted by the Greener NHS programme which is working to reduce the impact on public health and the environment, save money and reach net zero carbon.

We have recently appointed an exec lead for sustainability and social value to build on our work in this area. One of the areas which we’re working on right now is the Sustainability and Social Value Tool, which ensures that NHS member trusts are meeting the public sector organisation legal requirement on areas relating to sustainability and social value.

The importance of collaboration
As the regional organisation for London’s health economy, we are uniquely positioned to help London work together – delivering a strategy that brings procurement systems together across all five Integrated Care Boards (ICBs). The unique lessons that we learn help us to support the other ICBs which we work with across the country, involving key areas such as health inequality, social value, sustainability to drive better patient outcomes.

Working with key stakeholders and understanding patient flow and where people need to be, will allow us to structure procurement in the right way and support resilience of a service/product.

Collaboration on procurement helps us to share good practice, leverage common needs and work together towards shared aims.

As you may already be aware, NHS LPP works with the other NHS procurement hubs (NHS Commercial Solutions, East of England NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub and NHS North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative) under our ‘NHS Procurement in Partnership’ collaboration. We’re working collaboratively to combine our expertise and resources to avoid duplication in the market and deliver the best value to you, our NHS colleagues. One of our first outputs is a combined list of frameworks and DPSs which is now available on all hub websites on their NHS PiP dedicated page.

Get in touch
If there’s a particular area of work which you’d like our procurement support and expertise on, please get in touch with us at Customer@lpp.nhs.uk – we’d love to hear from you.