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Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
If you want to see wholesale abuse of privatisation watch the academy system of schooling go.
There are many ways to make a few quid out of a public contract, even when, in theory, you're serving the public on a non-profit basis. A usual popular one basically boils down to taking kickbacks from suppliers.
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Yep, the one I encountered most was the Variation order. The VO system was OK in theory as it allowed changes to be made to a contract in the event that one of the things defined by that contract was no longer possible (say, a product specified by the contract was no longer available so could be substituted for an equivalent).
What happened was that companies would tender incredibly low prices for some products and higher prices for others. When (or if) the hospital ordered the low priced product, they'd ask for a VO so they could sell an equivalent as the original product was no longer available. Of course, the equivalent would be a lot more expensive.
Of course, I complained about this, and pretty much every member of the administration staff and management I dealt with knew it was happening, but we could do nothing about it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramrod
Lol. So we have members here saying that the way for the NHS to save money is for it to leverage its buying power by purchasing 'stuff' in bulk as a gigantic entity and we have others saying that the way forward is for little bits of it to buy local  |
I think the NHS needs to get tougher on it's contractors. It's in a position where it *should* have suppliers almost falling over themselves to supply products to it.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heero_yuy
One of the biggest rackets going across government. On that list and you're in the money. Charge what you like and they'll still buy from you.
Maintanance contracts is another area of waste: I remember when my father ran a recruitment agency he did some calculations on the photocopier contract and concluded it was cheaper to run the thing into the deck and then just replace it than to have it "maintained".
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We had a contract similar to that. We had heated trolleys for food distribution that were essentially larger, computerised, versions of the "hostess" trolleys that seemed to be all the rage in the 80s.
These trolleys were chosen despite the fact that they apparently were not designed to cope with journeys over tarmac, which did mean they were unsuitable for our hospital, which consisted of one main building, and several smaller outbuildings (one of which was the kitchen), all joined by tarmac roads.
As such, they broke down regularly. We paid maintenance on them, but each time one broke down, it would cost at least £500 to repair, and we had at least one trolley out of action at any given time.
TBH, I'm not entirely sure what the computer did, apart from bump up the price and maintenance costs.