Marc Osborne has joined the NHS London Procurement Partnership (LPP) as senior workstream lead for the newly-expanded medical, surgical and supply chain workstream.
He was formerly acting director of procurement and supply chain at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and brings 27 years of NHS procurement experience to the organisation, including periods managing and delivering regional procurement solutions, and nine years leading medical and surgical teams at Healthcare Purchasing Consortium, the former NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub covering the West Midlands. In this role he was a significant contributor to building the medical and surgical portfolio from scratch.
For the past 18 months, he has also served on LPP’s steering board.
LPP is an NHS collaborative procurement hub which has saved £560m in its first six years, and is now tasked with saving £300m over the next three years for its NHS members.
“Managing the medical, surgical and supply chain markets is critical to achieving that £300m target, and it needs a team that can garner the respect of clinicians”, said LPP managing director, Mario Varela.
“Marc has the experience and understanding of the needs and demands of clinicians to get their support for managing this market. He combines that with the knowledge, seniority and personality to deal with major suppliers where they dominate categories of medical and surgical procurement, and the understanding of what young, innovative suppliers keen to enter these markets need to demonstrate.”
Osborne added: “Market management isn’t a simple matter of supplier bashing in order to lower prices. We will, of course, be looking at demand aggregation for commodity products. More importantly, we will be working constructively with clinicians and suppliers to find the best way of giving clinicians the clinically-proven and innovative technology they want at commercially competitive terms which balance the need for suppliers to support their business development with the urgent requirement for the NHS to cut costs.”