NHS - massively overpaying for basic items

[allmycats]

Why are the NHS still paying stupid inflated prices for basic items ?
In the chemist today I bought 100 low dose aspirin for £1.99
The lady said you can ask for these on the NHS and I said that as they are not much money I was happy to pay for them. She then told me that they would have cost the NHS £9.80 for the same thing.
The government need to really look into this sort of massive wastage and stop suppliers vastly overcharging.

The price we pay for a prescription (£9.80 in England) is NOT the price the NHS pays for them. I get free prescriptions up here in Scotland, so it’s not like the NHS gets drugs for free for Scotland.

The price paid in England is set at a level that is completely unrelated to the actual cost of the drug itself.

The pharmacist was talking about the actual monetary cost to the NHS for the item I bought. It is totally irrelevant to the cost of paying by the patient for a single item on an NHS prescription.

Tbh I don’t believe the pharmacist if they weren’t talking about the prescription charge. I’ve worked in NHS hospitals and the drug prices vary widely. Aspirin is cheap as chips (as we’d say).

The NHS drug tariff rate for a lack of 32 300mg aspirin tablets is £1.09. You are confusing it with the NHS prescription charge (or the person working in the pharmacy has got mixed up).

I don't disagree that NHS procurement can be mind-boggling, but aspirin isn't a good example.

In the case of medication I think the flat rate for prescriptions means that the basic paracetamol or whatever charges as are subsiding more expensive pharmaceuticals

*pack

Same with local authorities. We recently switched PPE/domestic items supplier, hair nets used to be £3 for 100, now it’s £10 for 100. All the other products went up. I don’t see where the saving is with the new supplier. Someone must have benefitted somewhere though.

Yeah this. You can Google it if you don't believe this poster @allmycats

I thought this was going to be a thread about procurement

Wait till you see the figures on that! This isn’t a good example of NHS wasting money and they’re cutting back on this kind of thing anyway.

You buying the aspirin doesn’t cost the NHS anything

Can you explain what you said, please? I’m baffled.

The companies that are selling this stuff at inflated prices are scamming the NHS

I've heard of this and saw branded weetabix being served .

Well, you could kind of say the same about the people who are working on procurement teams

But the NHS has a whole bunch of staff doing this kind of thing that they shouldn’t even have. It’s a massive gravy train at this point. Like many public sector Services. I worked with one lady who had moved from the public sector and she said to me that for everyone who is working really hard there is another person who’s doing naff all and probably costing the taxpayer money.

Nhs procurement also have responsibility for making sure products are safe and from ethical sources some items might be more expensive, but idea is that overall using authorised suppliers is cheaper and importantly safer. They also manage recalls etc. So, if random secretary buys a cheap chair from Amazon and it then breaks and injures someone who is responsible?

YANBUR - I’ve heard the exact same thing from my daughter who is a hospital doctor….NHS & us taxpayers all being rinsed by multiple suppliers. So awful!!!

Are you saying they are buying in the drugs at £9.80 per pack?

Although finding aspirin at all is a challenge at the moment I doubt anyone is paying £9 a pack.

Drugs in general aren’t good example but seem to be the one that always ends up with threads on here.

I don’t think most people are aware that the nhs pays a lot less for many drugs than most other countries due to the procurement contracts.

Some of it is wild. Our ward dishwasher just broke and I know they’re catering ones but I’m sure they said it was a 5 figure sum to replace. We used to have barcode stickers with cost price in our stock room of what pads, wipes etc cost that pretty much said consider this when you use, there’s still staff on my ward that complain if you use too many wipes in a wash bowl to wash people yet they’re see through like tissue paper and rip so easily 🙈 the wildest thing was displaying the cost price of oxygen masks, what am I meant to do, think oh no the cost of the oxygen mask when someone is deteriorating and needs oxygen 🫠

It's not just the NHS.

I work in a charity, and the procurement team drive me bonkers.

They understand nothing about the systems they manage procurement of, and big themselves up at every opportunity. They're shark-like about getting all the paperwork in place, but as far as I can see the best cost saving they could achieve would be making the whole team redundant.

Agree 100
I am a nurse and worked in community setting rapid response type role
Was provided with usual equipment which included blood pressure cuff/ stethoscope / thermometer and pulse oximeter
The pulse oximeter was useless.. it looked like a 1980s Alan sugar amstrad prototype.. so all the nurses on the team bought their own.. modern pulse oximters from amazon for around 20 quid
Senior management went spare didn't like it and threatened the nurses on the team that they wouldn't be insured to use it on patients and they were putting their pin on the line
Then covid came along and
Guess what
The tune changed .. every patient was advised to buy a pulse oximter off ... amazon ...

The private sector has always fleeced the public, and then whined about the public existing in the first place because ‘it’s the private sector that makes money’. Yeah. Off the public.

I’m eligible for free medication as I have epilepsy. That includes things like paracetamol and ibuprofen but I refuse to get it on the NHS given it’s 35p at Sainsbury’s. More people should do the same.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8d08v77ylro

There's recently been a problem getting hold of aspirin so prices are massively inflated at the moment. A couple of years ago the NHS price for 100x 75mg aspirin was around £2.50 now it's over £9.

Retail prices will drop before NHS prices do just because of the way the NHS pays pharmacies months after the pharmacy has bought and dispensed the drug.

Exactly this! It definitely doesn't cost the NHS £9.80 for aspirin 😆 I can assure you this isn't the case for any medicines on the NHS at all!

There is more to it than that. A while ago I was chair of the local playgroup/pre-school and we had a contract with the local council to provide pre-school places. So if you had a 3 or 4 year old who qualified for funded hours, you could send them to us and the council paid direct.

The system worked well for about 20 years. Then the council introduced new procurement rules to make sure a parent-run preschool established in the 70s wasn't diddling them out of cash, money laundering, or run by criminals.

OMG the tendering process. We had parents on the committee who were lawyers, doctors, accountants and we all found it so hard to get through. So much paperwork required, so much effort. And this was for a small "contract" to provide about 15 or 20 places, term time only. It was a full time job for about 4 weeks.

So when you are tendering to supply an organisation on the scale of the NHS you can easily see that the process must take months and months. Companies aren't doing that for free and neither should they. Same in all public sector organisations. The PTA wanted to buy the primary school some iPads from fundraising, we were told we couldn't because they had to come from X or Y supplier. Not from Curry's or John Lewis, even though they were cheaper.

Madness. I get that there needs to be checks to avoid people just giving the business to their mates or actively not getting the best deal, but it is costing the NHS and other public bodies a fortune