The NHS accounts for around 80% of all healthcare spending in the UK and spends around £27 billion every year on goods and services, and with recent Government announcements of increased investment in the NHS in the years to come, there is no sign that the NHS will remain anything other than the key market for companies looking to supply to the health sector for the foreseeable future.
The recent announcements from the UK Government’s latest spending review also provide a few clues as to where opportunities are likely to lie in the sector for suppliers in the near future. For instance, £2.3 billion will be invested over the next three years to transform diagnostic services, with at least 100 community diagnostic centres set to open across England.
Also announced was a £2.1 billion investment to support the innovative use of digital technologies to improve connections and efficiencies in hospitals and other care organisations, while another £1.5 billion will support the development of new surgical hubs, increased bed capacity and equipment to help elective services recover from the pandemic, including surgeries and other medical procedures.
All of this should inevitably lead to significant opportunities for suppliers looking to sell to the sector, especially those in the construction, IT, digital and medical equipment industries, but if the last year is anything to go by, opportunities will continue to present themselves for suppliers in almost every conceivable sector as investment in healthcare in the UK continues to gather pace.
Over the course of January to October 2021, over 6,000 contracts were awarded in the UK healthcare sector, with suppliers ranging from those providing diagnostics equipment and pathology services, to training programmes and energy efficiency consultancy. Whatever your business provides, there will almost certainly be a market for it in healthcare.
The value of these contracts ranged from billions of pounds to less than £1,000, demonstrating the breadth of the volume and scale of the goods and services required by the NHS and the size of the businesses supplying to them. The biggest contract saw a collection of suppliers agree to provide apprenticeship training and end-point assessment services to the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.
Among the other large contracts was a £47 billion deal for a collection of construction firms to build educational and research buildings and residential real estate for the Cumbria, Northumberland and Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust, and a £15 billion contract for a collection of firms to provide research and laboratory services for Public Health England.
If you’re looking to supply to the healthcare sector, Health Contracts International’s (HCI) powerful database of live healthcare tenders, actionable insights on emerging opportunities, buyer/supplier/industry award analysis and specialist industry news will be indispensable. Get started by downloading our latest report, which focuses on emerging prospects in the UK and worldwide healthcare markets in 2022 and beyond.
