Chris Whitehouse, a political consultant and expert on medical technology policy and regulation at Whitehouse Communications, and advisor to MedTech suppliers, highlights new resources allocated to NHS Supply Chain and warns of the dangers of its strategic shift to dominate non-acute supply of MedTech in the future.
NHS Supply Chain has received government approval to proceed with a multi-year Modernisation Programme that will invest in IT and logistics infrastructure to strengthen procurement and delivery services across England.
Purpose and CEO statement
The programme will fund improvements aimed at growing the value of procurement and delivery services, addressing critical IT resilience risks, and delivering a commitment to return a minimum of 1 billion GBP of recurring annual value to the NHS by 2030, according to Chief Executive Officer Andrew New. Andrew New said the approval “will allow NHS Supply Chain to make a step change in its ability to serve the NHS and patients across England, by investing in IT and supply chain infrastructures through a multi-year programme”.
Three large scale changes
- Replace legacy IT with modern cloud-based ERP and applications to improve reliability, information transparency, and user experience for customers and suppliers.
- Expand logistics infrastructure to increase capacity, hold a wider range of stocked items closer to customers, enable greater order consolidation, and support care outside acute settings in line with the NHS 10 Year Plan.
- Re-engineer end-to-end business processes to provide greater consistency, improved transparency, and increased data availability for better decision making.
Delivery partners, procurement and timeline
The programme will be delivered with newly contracted partners GXO Logistics and Tata Consultancy Services, and NHS Supply Chain is currently running a procurement to appoint a delivery and assurance provider expected to begin work in Spring 2026. Detailed preparation activity will follow the funding approval, with detailed design starting in early 2026 to inform the ongoing programme plan.
Strategic alignment and expected benefits
A joint statement from NHS England and NHS Supply Chain framed the investment as a pivotal step to build a resilient, sustainable, and innovative national supply chain, enabling better patient care, wider roll-out of assessed technologies, and a single procurement value and savings methodology. The organisations highlight that the investment will unlock over £1 billion in recurrent annual value by 2030, improve the ability to buy with an integrated pricing structure and single national price ambition, and support system priorities such as bringing care closer to communities and embracing digital innovation.
But does the Vision serve patients well?
NHS Supply Chain describes a vision of faster, more efficient, and more reliable delivery with real-time order visibility, delivery flexibility, and smarter use of NHS buying power, but the commitment to serving patients sounds thin from an organisation with a history and culture of going for the cheapest product in a category, and driving price down from there.
Whether the organisation, which comes late to the move towards value based procurement, will really put patient experience and outcomes, and whole system costs rather than item price, at the heart of its approach remains to be seen; yet a failure to do so risks limiting clinicians’ choice to prescribe from Part IX of the Drug Tariff, which lists medical devices available to the NHS, the product that they consider best meets their patient’s needs, rather than prescribing the one NHS Supply Chain can provide most cheaply.
The Author used AI in preparing this article. Comments upon or questions about this article can be addressed to chris.whitehouse@whitehousecomms.com.
