Quality of supply could be assessed nationally
Howard Stokoe: contract decisions can be made on the basis of evidence |
Local indicators of supplier performance could be brought together to provide information on the reliability of suppliers across the UK.
Outlining the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency’s work on assessing
supplier performance at the summer symposium of the Procurement
and Distribution Interest Group (PDIG) of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists in Coventry
last week, Howard Stokoe, lead category manager for general pharmaceuticals
(professional and network) at the NHS PASA, described how the programme
would be pushed forward.
Key performance indicators have been developed which can be used to assess
which suppliers are delivering lines correctly, on time and in full,
and supplying deliveries which do not cause problems for staff. To date,
these have been used at a local level, but Mr Stokoe believes that one
of the next steps for the NHS PASA should be to look at how to aggregate
these indicators to provide information on performance across the UK.
He also described the NHS PASA’s work on its supply chain excellence
programme. Reports on individual suppliers’ performances are gathered
via regular e-mails and collated, allowing a relative score for each
supplier to be developed, based on the average proportion of products
with issues delivered by each supplier.
Suppliers can then be ranked according to their relative score, allowing
objective measurement of supplier performance. In this way decisions
on which companies are awarded contracts can be based on evidence of
their past performance.
A report of PDIG’s summer symposium will appear in the next issue
of Hospital Pharmacist.
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