As a part of the Hub offering, our team of Procurement Specialists monitor and manage supply markets and ensuring contingencies are in place to prevent gaps in the continuity of patient care.

This summer, our Pharmacy team worked with the Homecare market this summer when the second largest provider in the UK market was afflicted with both an acute spike of Covid-19 cases and a large number of ‘pings’ from the NHS Track and Trace app, causing a significant pressure on staffing and service provision.

As the National Homecare Medicines Committee chair was on leave during the initial week of the occurrence, our Head of Pharmacy Procurement Joe Bassett coordinated the national communications between the supplier, other Homecare leads and their respective trusts.

In order to protect service provision, the decision was made to suspend all new patient registrations.

The situation was closely monitored by our team, with daily calls to Homecare provider to monitor situation and regular reporting into regional chief pharmacist and Pharmaceutical Market Strategy Group (PMSG) representative.

Throughout the incident, we supported trusts with identifying alternative supply routes, either with other homecare providers, with industry funded homecare services, with our NHS funded framework agreement or via in-house supply.

We are now pleased report that the situation is improving, with new patient registrations due to re-open on 20th August 2021.

If you have any questions regarding our Homecare offering, or how we work to manage the Homecare supply market, please contact: joe.bassett@eoecph.nhs.uk.