Hospital System and Service Introductions
Communication, culture and roles and responsibilities are the three most important factors in any new materials management service, without these collective principles in place and strongly enforced, all systems and new service solutions will fail without the collective buy-in from the Trust clinical/non-clinical and Eleanor teams.
As with any service, both the Trust and Eleanor teams look for proactive people who can use their initiative to solve problems. In an ideal world, all our work colleagues would communicate well without misunderstandings or conflict. Sadly, even communication training isn’t going to guarantee that this will always be the case, but initiating communications training, coupled with culture and change management programmes, will collectively help improve how Trust and Eleanor’s staff interact with each other.
Eleanor promotes Procurement Category Leaders, Supply Chain, Clinical and Non-Clinical Engagement User groups to embrace HOSLO, attend system and service introduction sessions and understand how innovation and digitalisation can help support their individual and collective roles and responsibilities. With any system, it is only as good as the teams using and embracing the new technology and, therefore, equally important that end users attend Eleanor’s ‘As is’ and ‘To be’ process mapping workshops where together we define the current ‘As is’ practice and how the future and HOSLO will enhance the current practices, i.e. the ‘To be’. These sessions focus on end users’ needs and constraints, including blue sky system feature developments and cultural behaviours and mindsets.
The following illustration is a real-life ‘high level’ ‘To be’ example of a ‘best practice’ hospital supply chain designed with our NHS teams. Scroll horizontally for full view.
Supplier Engagement
As part of the relationship management programme between Eleanor and the NHS procurement teams, ‘Supplier ‘relationship’ and ‘engagement’ management’ is key to the success of a service contract. Quarter reviews and publication of HOSLO supplier delivery (inc carbon footprint) volume, lead times, Scan4Safety progression, and OTIF order performance is key. Complete visibility of supplier purchase order errors and costs along with key ‘strategic’ suppliers or perhaps send their volume and performance data to them for review from our HOSLO system.
Scan4Safety Team
Eleanor promotes working with ICS regional and Trust Scan4Safety Teams to define all the GLN, GTIN and associated requirements of Trust and Eleanor systems as part of the implementation to document robust policies, procedures and systems within procurement to ensure all products can be scanned and the cost of the procedures undertaken charged appropriately.
Customer Surveys
Face-to-face and online end-user interaction is essential to encourage and evolve into a new digital world and digestion of data. It will also provide a platform for materials service feedback from end users in the form of customer surveys and blue-sky commentary on how the service can be improved. Customer surveys and System audit tools are introduced as part of the HOSLO system rollout to ensure ‘clinical end-user feedback’ and supplier feedback is captured.
