Wakefield Trinity • Corona Virus

What Supplychain do you work in BG?

I can`t really comment on Ventilators as I have not had any involvement in those and If I am honest I don`t know the supply chain well enough to comment on that, but I work for the NHS in a national procurement role so I am relatively close to the the action on this on PPE. I will not share anything that is not already in the public domain, instead just re-iterate the problems that have led us to the so called crisis.

The dedicated channel for the PPE has not been as successful as it should of been in terms of the distribution, IMO down to the management by Clipper in the first instance, an introduction that was made to ease the pressure on Unipart who have come in for some stick in there own part, this has just led to another cog to go through in the chain, another company not familiar with the NHS Procurement landscape so there has been an issue with distribution yes.

There were contingency stock, a great deal of contingency stock actually of PPE, but the increase in demand on some lines far outweigh what could of ever been planned for, believe me if you saw the uptake, you would think exactly the same thing - Lets not forget that Trusts have there own procurement teams so there is no control so to speak on limiting product going into the trust, in essence this means 200+ trusts in England alone acting as separate organisations and not singing from the same hymn sheet - Not only is there a massive demand of PPE going into the Nightingale hospitals in London, Harrogate, Birmingham, Manchester etc the actual issue itself is with the trusts stock piling PPE, panic buying in the first instance, not to mention the various different routes to market for a trust to procure product is massively diluting an already small pool of production in some areas, distributors bringing product in and product sitting there on a shelf until a trust decides that they have no other option other than to be pay through the roof to obtain this product and are willing to explain later down the line compliant routes to market.