Heartbeat: Peer review awards procurement with national accreditation

February 20, 2020

Procurement has a key role to play in supporting the delivery of high-quality patient care whilst ensuring value for money is achieved. It is with this in mind that our procurement team recently undertook and successfully obtained their level 1 accreditation.

Working through a peer review the team were assessed against six key areas:

1. Strategy and organisation
2. People and skills
3. Strategic procurement
4. Supply chain, data
5. Systems and performance management
6. Policies and procedures

To achieve the accreditation the procurement team were tasked with collecting evidence to support the six key areas as well as a full assessment day led by Mike Hanson, Director of Procurement, Paul Mellor, Assistant Director of Procurement and Dinah McLannahan, Acting Director of Finance.

“We faced numerous challenges whilst trying to attain the accreditation as it was quite an intense and time-consuming process,” explained Paul.

“Getting the accreditation has helped us to identify gaps in processes we have so while this initially required a lot of work to update, going forward it will be extremely beneficial for the department.”

Within the accreditation process, there are three levels which are level 1 building, level 2 achieving and level 3 excelling which can only be achieved in order.

Dinah believes the building accreditation is a real positive for procurement. She said: “Procurement obtaining their level 1 is a fantastic step in the right direction because as an organisation we can now say we are a level 1 accredited Trust which is vital in regards to NHS Improvement. Also, the accreditation will improve the Trust’s procurement league table position as a level 1 holds a weighting within the league table itself.”

In 2020, our procurement team are aiming to obtain their level 2 accreditation which will only further improve processes within the department thus making improvements in our organisation.