Streamline now to protect resources, experts say
Released 10/08/2010
Streamlined supply management predicted
As GP practices start to join forces in consortia to deliver the government agenda, experts are predicting a new age for buying groups and renewed demand for tools to streamline supply management.
Steve Dunn, CEO of William Medical Supplies (WMS) is warning GP practices to ditch antiquated purchasing patterns to ease the acute time and resource pressures expected from the NHS white paper.
"With shadow consortia already forming, practices are going to find themselves spread too thinly and that is when things can start to fail," he said.
"Efficient use of time is essential for the new commissioning responsibilities to deliver better patient outcomes, and the focus needs to be on exceptional professional standards and managing budgets properly."
Dunn says that unplanned buying patterns, where practices continue to order medical goods and services from up to 16 separate sources, are burdening them with overstocks, multiple delivery costs, disruption and extra paperwork when time is in short supply - and it is preventing them achieving consistent value.
"Have no doubt, practice managers will soon have too much to do without worrying about how to save on medical and office supplies, telephone costs or coping with hundreds of invoices. Now is a good time to review this as any changes will take a while to implement."
He also says the white paper will create an impetus for collaboration and the new consortia will revive the principles of the buying group to help GPs enjoy real purchasing power.
"Progressive practices have always realised the benefits of buying groups and of working with one-stop shop buying services like ours, so we have already helped many groups of GPs to slash duplication, waste and costs and to focus on their professional standards.
"Practices who want to flourish in the new environment need to be thinking about what they must do now to structure their work, by researching who they will partner with to deliver good service."
John Baldaro, of purchasing experts PracticeProfit, works exclusively with practices to reduce costs and streamline buying activity. He says more must embrace smarter buying methods to offset climbing practice costs and save time. And he says medical costs are the single biggest expense in any practice after staff costs.
"We have worked well with collaborative groups in the past. Often practices limit themselves to joint buying of vaccines but there is much greater potential. It can take a little external assistance to establish the necessary spend visibility and create a local buying framework, but groups are quickly self sufficient.
"Individual practices have different methods of dealing with all manner of things, different payment and invoicing, different stationery and telephone suppliers, different pharmaceutical and medical suppliers.
"This means duplication of costs and trammels collective working. Now practices will have to commission together they will be more likely to embrace collaboration in other areas."
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