This article features unique insights from Fiona Hilton, Director of Commercial Best Practice and Engagement (NHS England) who was a guest speaker on our exclusive webinar: ‘The New Strategic Framework for NHS Commercial – A Supplier’s Perspective’.
This article has been peer-reviewed by Fiona Hilton and Grahame Steed, Director of Public Policy and Research (BiP Solutions), of which HCI is a part.
This article will explore the new Strategic Framework for NHS Commercial, the key priorities, the benefits of this framework and how it will positively impact suppliers.
Key Takeaways
The outcome and the ambition of the NHS strategic framework, in summary, is really to be able to:
- Drive collaboration across the commercial teams.
- Leverage the NHS collective buying power within the public sector.
- Provide clear and consistent guidance on how to contract and
- Raise the overall productivity and efficiency across the whole of the system
- Seek to deliver on the commitments outlined in the NHS long-term plan.
About Fiona Hilton
Fiona Hilton has worked for the last four years leading the NHS Commercial Delivery team in NHS England. She has led several commercial teams in the private sector across Kingfisher, Boots Woolsey, and smaller SMEs.
The Strategic Framework covers the commercial ambitions and objectives for the next five years. The Strategic Framework for NHS Commercial has four key themes:
- Our people – attracting the best and most diverse commercial talent to the NHS.
- Digital and transparency – driving consistency in the systems that they deploy so that quality data can be used as a strategic asset.
- How we work – remaining agile but embedding consistency in their processes to ensure best practices across the system.
- Influence and scale – leveraging their influence and scale to strengthen partnerships, fostering healthy supply markets, developing and shaping the market and delivering wider social value through procurement.
“Having the patient at the heart of everything we do in all our commercial activity goes without saying” – Fiona Hilton.
The NHS needed a strategic framework that aligned all the commercial teams to the NHS landscape and bound the efforts of everybody that drove collaboration across the whole team. It is the first of its kind, marking a step of engagement across the whole commercial community.
Leveraging the NHS’s collective buying power and providing clear and consistent guidance to suppliers on how to contract with the NHS is critical for the strategic framework procurement capability.
The Procurement Process For The Supply Chain
The procurement process for suppliers at the moment, especially the interventions, is the Supplier Engagement Plan. The Supplier Engagement Plan forms part of the wider commercial change that seeks to fulfil the needs of the NHS more effectively.
To ensure that the NHS can continue to deliver on its ambitions, the Supplier Engagement Plan framework seeks to:
- Ensure alignment between commercial teams and newer integrated care systems.
- Promotes collaboration across commercial teams.
- Enables the NHS to have more collective buying power with medium sized enterprises.
- Provides suppliers with clear guidance on NHS contracting requirements.
- Enables more fluid partnerships between the NHS and the commercial market.
- Fair and transparent procurement practices under the new framework
“We see the new Procurement Act as a really exciting opportunity to be able to work with the commercial community and our suppliers to be able to ensure that we can optimise the new regulations and the ambitions of the Procurement Act to deliver better value” – Fiona Hilton.
NHS England publishes their commercial pipeline every six months. This is available on the NHS website and is a Cabinet Office requirement and a key deliverable. The majority of the NHS trusts will also be publishing this regularly.
The Provider Selection Regime is also already in play from the beginning of this year. This is a set of rules for procuring health care services in England by organisations termed relevant authorities. Public sector organisations can find out more about legislative changes to NHS procurement.
The Impact of the Strategic Framework on SMEs
The majority of NHS suppliers are smaller suppliers. NHS England has an SME action plan that they published in February 2024. It sets out how they will help to deliver on their ‘commitment to small and medium enterprises and enable the NHS to benefit from their significant value and contribution to patient care’.
As well as round tables to support accessibility and inclusivity, NHS England has also developed advice and signposting, demonstrating their commitment to working more closely with the SME community to ensure value based procurement for all government departments and NHS services.
The Procurement Act 2023 which will come into effect in February next year is also going to enable NHS England to work much more closely with SMEs.
The Strategic Framework And Collaboration
“One of the things we’ve been working on is reducing the frameworks to be able to look at the inefficiencies across the commercial team as procurement processes will be simplified and enable the NHS to leverage its scale and national pricing,” – Fiona Hilton.
From 1 April 2024, the NHS trusts are required to purchase goods and services and works by National Accredited Framework hosts only. This will allow them to also look at dynamic purchasing systems for NHS organisations, contracting authorities, and procurement teams.
Resilience And Contingency Planning Within The Strategic Framework
“Concerning energy, as an example, one of the things we have been doing over the last few months is identifying energy as a highly commoditized area, where through an alternative and centralised purchasing strategy, the NHS can achieve greater value for money, and find efficiencies for this reinvestment into frontline services and patient care, which is predominantly what we’re here to be able to do.
We have now agreed in partnership with Crown Commercial Services to develop a specific energy agreement under this framework, which is called the ‘Supply of Energy’ and we estimate that transitioning to a centralised purchasing agreement has the potential to save nearly a hundred million pounds per year for the NHS.
The details of this purchasing strategy, working with CCS to shape this is just one example of the sort of work we want to be able to do on big commoditised areas”. As well as the financial benefits, there are other spinoff benefits in terms of efficiency and resilience.
Opportunities For Suppliers To Provide Feedback On The Strategic Framework
It is a real priority for NHS England to continue engagement with suppliers. They are committed to establishing formal routes to work with the supply chain.
As well as round tables with trade bodies and SMEs to engage, there have been supply forums and the SME action plan.
There needs to be a cultural change as well, which they recognise and NHS England wants to lead from the front by demonstrating a partnership approach.
The Role of Social Value and the Delivery of Net Zero
The role of social value and the delivery of Net Zero:
- Huge role in the future of the supply chain.
- Introduced the NHS supply roadmap in September.
- We have an ambition that’s clearly outlined to be net zero.
- We’re ensuring we engage with the supply chain and working with you on embedding these milestones into all our procurements.
- We are using the NHS Evergreen sustainable supplier assessment.
We’ve got a thousand suppliers that have now registered and are using that and would encourage all our suppliers to engage and be able to work with us on the evergreen roadmap.
Social value being built into all the procurements is now just best practice. My advice would be to make sure we engage with the sustainability team, there are so many opportunities to join our webinars and learn more about what each of the milestones means specifically to you as a business.
Mechanisms in place to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the new strategic framework from an NHS buyer and supplier perspective
- Steering board – approvals board
- Working as a true matrix now and leading not just from NHS England but working as a matrix organisation rather than in silos.
