Heartbeat: Procurement delivers on PPE challenge

July 3, 2020

When COVID-19 struck and hospitals across the country began frantically scrambling for gloves, gowns and masks, the procurement team at our Trust were hard at work phoning suppliers and building their own supply chain to ensure we could continue protecting our patients and staff.

Whilst our Trust often holds local stocks of common Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the unprecedented scale and impact of COVID-19 brought with it challenges that had never been imagined, but nevertheless challenges that were wholeheartedly taken on by the procurement team.

With the disastrous thought of ‘what if we run out?’ running through their minds, the team quickly took on the task not simply of sourcing the vital protective equipment but also the task of ensuring it went to the right departments.

To find out more about the procurement response to COVID-19, Heartbeat caught up with Chief Finance Officer and interim ‘Tsar of PPE’ Dinah McLannahan. She said: “COVID-19 is an incredibly challenging virus for our clinical teams to manage. We knew that the only way to keep them safe was to ensure that we had adequate supplies of equipment and PPE for them to be able to focus on their job of keeping patients safe and well. Stocks of PPE unfortunately very quickly became scarce, not just locally or nationally, but internationally, so our teams had to work very hard to make sure they scoured every one of our suppliers to keep stocks coming in.

“Alongside the issue of ensuring an uninterrupted supply of PPE, the team also worked to develop a dashboard which allowed us to not only map the current usage rates of critical PPE but also to forecast usage against our deliveries.

“The ever-changing supply chain also brought with it the challenges of aligning the needs of our staff with the supply of equipment.

One of the critical elements of PPE is the assurance that it works as intended. With masks, this is determined by fit testing where staff wear a mask and a machine is used to check the seal and ensure it is doing its job. When particular masks became short in supply, our teams went ahead and supported additional fit testing sessions so that staff could go to work, safe in the knowledge that the equipment they had was keeping them safe from COVID-19.”

Dinah added: “The procurement teams have done an amazing job to keep this critical piece of our COVID-19 infrastructure going. We’ve had some close calls, but through their hard work, we’ve managed to keep everything going. Thank you to not only the guys in the procurement offices but also all of our colleagues who have been out on the ground managing the stock and supporting the distribution across our organisation.