Listening is key to healthcare innovation Leave a comment
Since its inception more than 75 years ago, the NHS has been a leader in healthcare innovation, and it’s through existing relationships with trusts that I heard about the need for a simple idea that could save time and improve outcomes for patients – and it starts with procurement.
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As with any department responsible for spending public money, the fairness of every procurement transaction has to be carefully considered – however, in fast-paced environments such as hospitals, it’s not always that straightforward.
Critical decisions
While critical health decisions are being made on the frontline day in, day out, key decisions about purchasing the equipment and services to support this are being made in the background, often at pace, to help ensure the best patient outcomes.
There’s a constant pressure on the procurement teams from requisitioners needing the right products quickly. And with the clock ticking, it’s a race against time to find what’s required at the best possible price and through a compliant framework – and that’s where things can get complicated and time-consuming.
Enormous task
It’s an enormous task, supporting the purchasing needs of over 1.2 million FTE staff across all NHS hospital and Community Health Services, while ensuring that all procurement processes and frameworks have been followed compliantly.
And with a vast amount of frameworks from various framework providers, buyers can spend many hours trawling websites to find the right framework, each having different user interfaces to navigate varying amounts of data.
This is what it must have been like trying to rent or buy a property before platforms like Rightmove entered the market, where searchers would have to try to remember all of the estate agents that could be listing in their area, often ending in frustration.
Consolidation websites are now commonplace in many areas of our consumer lives: insurance, energy, loans and more besides.
However, for some reason, in business and public sector services, users have been forced to put up with a fragmented work process – until now.
A better way
During the HCSA conference in Harrogate in 2021, Virtualstock had a discussion with Claire Bye, the chief procurement officer at University Hospitals Plymouth Trust, who spoke of a long-time need for a better way to navigate procurement frameworks.
Six months after Claire’s request, and with her guidance, Framespan was created – the first and only platform containing all NHS frameworks, making searching for the correct procurement pathway quick, easy and accurate.
The central directory is easily navigated, giving one view of the market. It’s regularly updated and frameworks can be filtered by provider, expiry date, award type and category, amongst others.
Growth continues
Framespan, powered by Virtualstock, launched in November 2022 and there are now more than 1,000 frameworks from 18 framework providers. It’s being used by more than 700 NHS buyers from 62 hospital trusts in England, along with more than 220 users in education, blue light services and local authorities to name a few – and this growth continues.
For me, the continued success of Framespan is about listening to what providers are telling us, being collaborative in our approach to development and creating a tool that’s easily accessible, adaptable and fit for the future – there’s more about this, and information on how to get started, at framespan.com.
Framespan is delighted to be hosting a live training webinar Understanding Procurement Reform, with PASS Procurement, on Wednesday, 3 May 2023 at 9:15am. Register now to save your seat.
