Diversifying NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Supply Chain
Organisation: NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
Location: Glasgow
Populations served: Circa 1.2m people across Glasgow City, East Dunbartonshire, West Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, East Renfrewshire, Inverclyde
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) successfully applied to the Test and Learn programme, funded by the Health Foundation and NHS England for Health Anchors Learning Network members in late 2021, to test new approaches to diversifying the Board’s supply chain. The Supplier Development Programme (SDP) was engaged as a key delivery partner in recognition of its leading Scottish wide role as a experts in supporting SMEs and social enterprise better connect to public sector procurement opportunities.
The immediate trigger for the pilot was identification in the NHSGGC Talent Inclusion and Diversity Evaluation (TIDE) report (July 2021) of the need to strengthen an inclusive organisational culture through improved procurement practice. The subsequent TIDE ‘roadmap’ details the procurement actions required to make a long-term strategic change to become more inclusive. This informed the pilot project plan, and its overall aims to reach businesses owned and led by people from diverse backgrounds and overall, increase diversity within the supply chain.
Impact of the programme
Each region of Scotland has a Health Board with its own procurement department. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) covers six local authority areas in the Glasgow City Region and represents circa 30% of Scotland’s total Health Board spend.
NHSGGC wanted to encourage wider participation from all SMEs, and to further support small businesses to understand the potential opportunities that are tendered by the NHS and their supply chains, demystifying that it is only medical or pharmaceutical requirements that they procure.
The Supplier Development Programme (SDP) worked with NHSGGC to deliver a project focused on increasing diversity within their supply chains, encouraging businesses led by, for, and with people with protected characteristics as defined by the Equalities Act Scotland & Fairer Scotland Duty, to work with them.
Businesses of all sizes, particularly those that may be owned or led by women, minority, disabled and LGBTQ+ individuals, were invited to participate in a programme of free tender training webinars in 2022. These events were designed to raise awareness and get suppliers ‘tender ready’ for future contract opportunities. A range of resources, tools, and expert guidance on how businesses, social enterprises and supported businesses can work with NHSGGC were provided - free.
From May to December 2022, SDP provided 6 supplier engagement and tender training webinars to 136 attendees from 127 unique Scottish businesses. In total, 282 bookings were taken through the SDP website in advance of these webinars which demonstrates overall awareness of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and SDP.
In total, 87 Scottish SMEs that registered and attended SDP events as part of this project identified as being 50% or more owned or led by individuals with protected characteristics. This means that overall, 64% of all unique Scottish SMEs that attended the six supplier engagement and training events identified as being 50% or more owned or led by individuals with protected characteristics, and therefore did increase NHSGGC’s diversification goals.
Of those that responded to surveys, 81% of all Scottish SMEs said they were more likely to bid for future public contracts as a direct result of participating in SDP events with NHSGGC. Additionally, 86% were more positive about potentially working with the NHS and 82% thought their business could benefit from this specific project to diversify the NHS supply chain. Finally, after participating in SDP events with NHSGGC, 97% of Scottish SMEs felt the wider Scottish public sector is willing and able to do business with organisations like theirs, and 100% of Scottish SMEs recommended SDP supplier engagement and training events to other businesses.
How the programme was delivered
In addition to buyer-side engagement within NHSGGC, SDP leveraged its network of procurement and economic development colleagues at the eight local authority councils in the Glasgow City Region to support research into the marketplace - this included the two local authorities within NHS Lanarkshire as well as NHSGGC. A number of pre-meetings were undertaken to connect with recognised social/minority organisations and networks to inform them about the NHSGGC project.
SDP invited 126 partner organisations to attend a, “Diversifying the NHS Greater Glasgow and NHS Lanarkshire Supply Chain Partner Engagement Event” and created a free promotional toolkit to help these organisation publicise both the project and future webinar events to businesses and social enterprises within their established networks. This also included an opportunity for free publicity for each organisation, with a link to websites and logos on SDP’s NHS Support Wall.
The NHS Support Wall contains recognised organisations that are committed to working in partnership to engage and encourage wider diversity in suppliers to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lanarkshire, to connect to free tendering support available in Scotland through the Supplier Development Programme.
NHSGGC and SDP worked together to organise, deliver and track outcomes related to a full programme of supplier engagement events and tender training delivered in-person and via webinar throughout the project.
What is the future of this programme?
As timelines for contracts are so long, further data analysis would be required to align SDP’s supplier engagement data with Open Data on Public Contracts Scotland, to evidence correlation with Contract Award Notices.
The pilot project progressed and delivered as planned. Data was captured independently and robustly by SDP, and learning was reported on an on-going basis through a partner Steering Group which met monthly.
Participant numbers across all the events held were encouraging – confirming the need and demand for a project of this nature. This was greatly assisted by the buy-in of all partners in enthusiastically promoting the pilot, and assisting in the identification of targeted businesses that could benefit from the support.
Ongoing and wide-ranging social media reach also assisted awareness and involvement.
In addition to overall numbers, metrics also indicate significant connections were made to businesses with protected characteristics, and to many businesses with no or very limited experience of public sector tendering, or health sector tenders.
Qualitative feedback on all events was very good and highlighted significant learning, growing participant awareness, and increasing intentions to become a part of the NHSGGC supply chain in future.
The pilot developed new and deeper networks and partnerships. The core relationship between NHSGGC and the SDP worked extremely well – utilising respective strengths and intelligence, and growing understandings.
The links with a sister project in NHS Lanarkshire were positive, including shared events where applicable. This added the potential to add a further regional dimension to pilot learning.
SDP’s data collection has undoubtedly been strengthened by inclusion of optional business equalities data, which was rolled out to all suppliers currently registered with SDP as well as new registrations, demonstrating a sustainable outcome of the project for Scotland’s wider public sector.
The pilot work is of ever-increasing relevance to wider policy objectives, notably the procurement pillar of Community Wealth Building, and the aspirations ‘Anchors Delivery Group’ within the Scottish Government’s Place and Wellbeing Programme.
This project provides a positive example of how the use of the SDP can help facilitate NHSGGC’s desire to become an effective “anchor institution” to use its economic leverage to deliver more direct economic benefit and participation from local communities.
Leadership & organisational support
NHSGGC’s Head of Procurement was committed to delivering this project from the outset and made the initial approach to SDP to partner in delivering this project.
This project was also a regular agenda item for both the NHSGGC Sustainability Governance group, and the NHSGGC Community Wealth Building Group.
The partnership developed with the Supplier Development Programme was critical to the pilot’s delivery and success. This is a well-established Scottish wide initiative involving all 32 local authorities, and an increasing number of other public sector bodies and had a database of over 20,000 diverse Scottish SME, Third sector and social enterprise organisation. The pilot both benefitted and further strengthened links between the SDP and Scotland’s largest Health Board.
Advice for others doing similar work
SDP as the lead strategic partner for Scotland’s public sector in supplier engagement provided a solid foundation to NHSGGC to launch this pilot project.
Registration by suppliers was highest when the NHSGGC communications team supported SDP’s communications on social media and within the media, which suggests that this area could be expanded upon more strategically in the future between the two organisations. Additional capacity is also recommended to support partner organisations in promoting supplier engagement events in the future to Scottish SMEs with targeted demographics.
Further work is recommended to be taken forward by SDP to further drill down into supplier data to delineate between supplier attitudes and outcomes from businesses owned or led by people with protected characteristics, to further evidence the diversification of Scotland’s public sector supply base.
For more information about the programme, contact Julie McGahan at Julie.mcgahan@ggc.scot.nhs.uk