Complete Ophthalmology Solutions 2 Customer Engagement Guide

• It delivers safe, clinically assessed products that do the job you need them to.
• All products have been vetted. All are good quality products that are fit for purpose.
• Suppliers on the framework will take part in trials where you can assess the products for yourself and see the alternative options that are available.
• By working with your in-house procurement team from the outset, the framework process allows you to ensure that the products chosen will deliver what you want and need clinically.
• The process provides a structure to think through what ophthalmology equipment you will need in the financial year and enables that to be brought together into a single package.
• This will deliver better prices, while still ensuring the right, safe products are provided.

• Makes project management easier – it gives you a process to achieve buy-in of all departments to deliver a successful procurement exercise.
• Helps you put all clinically assessed product options to the end users with the ability to run trials with clinical teams to let them try the alternatives available.
• Tells you who to contact, how to access the savings and what is available – all in one place.
• Identifies quick wins and longer-term savings opportunities.
• Delivers the best savings by encouraging all activity to be aggregated, with even larger savings when operating within collaborations and Sustainability Transformation Partnerships (STPs).
• Ensures all activity is compliant with EU public procurement regulations.
• Ensures open competition on capital equipment.
• Prices secured for one trust are available for all NHS trusts.

• It provides all the guarantees and compliance assurances and paperwork that you need to know you have a robust business case ready to sign off.
• If the options in front of you aren’t the cheapest you will have the clinical justification provided as to why the preferred option was selected instead and the evidence to back that up.
• You can have complete confidence in the suppliers chosen.

We offer a variety of options and routes to market under our parallel frameworks for consumables and equipment:

• Amortisation
• Banded pricing
  See our Useful Links section for further information
• Bulk deal saving opportunities
• Direct Capital Equipment call off
• Multi trust aggregation
• Operating / finance lease funding
• Volume commitment.

See our Useful Links section for further information on Orthopaedics, Trauma and Spine, and Ophthalmology. The team includes highly skilled and knowledgeable colleagues with first-hand experience of ophthalmic and patient care, as well as commercial and product specialists from the ophthalmic industry, who have experience of working in theatres with clinical leads up and down the country.

Our framework agreement provides access to a comprehensive portfolio of suppliers offering a wider range of product options, giving trusts the opportunity to select products that are clinically acceptable and offer value for money while delivering quality patient outcomes.

The efficiencies of our service provide trusts with a compliant route to market via a framework agreement offering a wide range of suppliers and products available via the NHS Supply Chain online ordering system, enabling significant back office savings.

Some of the key benefits of choosing NHS Supply Chain are:

• Provides clinically assured products while enabling savings
• Speeds up procurement processes for everyone involved by providing a fully supported end-to-end process
• Ensures everything is compliant with EU public procurement regulations from outset to completion, removing the need for local procurement teams to undertake their own tenders
• Provides robust analysis for trusts’ full ophthalmic spend, identifying ‘quick wins’ and longer-term opportunities
• Provides an open process to engage clinicians on all the options and ensure the right products are chosen for patients
• Ease of ordering
• Makes project management easier by setting out all the steps in advance
• Provides competitive national pricing which has delivered significant cash releasing savings for the NHS to date
• Supports the Lord Carter recommendations to remove unwarranted variation.

Being at the forefront of the changing landscape and working closely with national initiatives, programmes and professional bodies ensures that options presented to clinical teams are future proofed and in line with national thinking and best practice.

We also offer a range of optional products and services and have a team on hand to support you throughout the procurement process.

We provide dedicated ICS Managers who will help to solve any issues on your behalf and ensure high service levels are always met. The key role of each manager is to support your procurement department and ensure access to the required products and people to deliver projects in a timely way. To support this process, they need to:

• Understand your trust’s current contract arrangements, when they run until and if they are locked in with any certain suppliers that may need to be excluded in the scope of any potential project.
• Understand if there are any barriers, such as amortised agreements including capital equipment or contractual limitations.
• Understand which clinicians need to be involved and if your trust has them on board with any potential project.

See our Useful Links section for your local ICS Manager’s contact details (on our ‘Hospital Care’ team page).

Helping you through the process

Our framework agreement provide the choice of products and equipment you need through a procurement route that suits you, saving you time and money.

Our Category Managers are procurement specialists in their product field who can give guidance and support to identify savings opportunities. They will work with you to ensure trust objectives are clearly identified early in the process.

• Our team will work with your clinical, procurement and directorate leads to review opportunities available to your trust by utilising the framework.
• Options available will include supporting your trust to complete a full ophthalmic spend review and identify ‘quick wins’ or ‘as is’ savings options.
• Quick wins are identified by completing a full review of a trusts’ ophthalmic spend and then benchmarking this against the Complete Ophthalmology Solutions Framework Agreement.
• The outcome and analysis will identify opportunities where your trust can save money by doing nothing other than providing your consent to migrate to Complete Ophthalmology Solutions pricing and transact via the NHS Supply Chain eDirect route.
• The Complete Ophthalmology Access Agreement will need to be signed and returned by the authorised procurement lead. This will enable our Ophthalmology Team to notify suppliers of the appropriate price band to be activated to ensure the correct catalogue pricing is available to your trust, enabling orders to be placed.
• It is also possible for product alternative analyses to be completed for various lots within the framework agreement which highlight savings that can be accessed through other suppliers available within the framework agreement.
• The framework can be accessed with no commitment, or commitments for two, three or four years at any point during the lifetime of the agreement.
• Additional innovative offers may be offered by suppliers which could be available to you. Prices will be fixed for the commitment period once the Complete Ophthalmology Solutions Access Agreement has been signed by the procurement leads at your trust and returned to us.

Get in touch with us at any time but of course the sooner the better – especially when you are hoping to maximise the opportunities available.

To contact your Ophthalmology Category Managers email:

In association with your local Account Manager complete an Account Management Scoping Document for ophthalmology. This will be passed to us to review and assess the opportunity.

See our Downloads ▼ section for the scoping document.

To maximise opportunities for your trust, our team will need to understand what is currently in place and when existing contracts come to an end.

We will work with you to fulfil your requirements, whether that is to maintain existing supply options or make wholescale changes, including implementation of efficiency programmes.

We can only progress your request once we have:

• A completed benchmarking template – this is available from our Ophthalmology Category Managers
• Your trust’s most recent 12-month spend data
• For new capital equipment a Statement of Requirements (SOR) tailored to your end user specification will also need to be completed.

Our analysis allows us to produce a Spend Efficiency Report (SER) for your trust highlighting:

• Current spend distribution across all categorised areas of spend
• Current spend versus framework for ‘quick wins’
• For new capital equipment, a bid summary of quoted product options and savings offered will be provided for trust evaluation.

The team will talk you through all the different options and guide you through the next steps allowing your trust to make an informed choice on the next steps and how to access the opportunities available.

We will look at three main avenues when reviewing ophthalmology:

1. We can present data on an “as is” basis for your trust to just switch to the framework agreement on a no commitment basis. Once data is received, and all information is correct this will take approximately three weeks to run through our data team. The same document will also present options for volume commitment. For implementation and code loading this will take approximately six weeks in line with internal policies and procedures that must be followed.
2. Alongside doing the “as is” benchmarking process we can run a further analysis to establish alternative products from the supplier base. This process takes around 12 weeks to complete.
3. We also offer the option to amortise Capital Equipment via the cost of the consumables and this can be utilised under Lot 7 of the framework.

Through our access to the Department for Health and Social Care’s Working Capital Fund we can provide significant discounts when buying capital equipment. We do this through bulk purchasing deals with suppliers under the terms of our existing framework agreements.

Using this fund, NHS Supply Chain works with suppliers to remove the costs that order patterns can create and then pass the subsequent savings to NHS trusts.

We do this by committing to buy a set number of devices at base specification that allows the supplier to have confidence in pre-booking the manufacturing and delivery processes.

Your trust still has flexibility over the final specification depending on your specific requirements, while benefitting from these savings.

The NHS Supply Chain Ophthalmology Framework team has put in place several commitment deals that utilise the buying power of the NHS to benefit individual trusts.

Current bulk buying offers

You can see the latest deals available on our ophthalmology savings opportunities page. See our Useful Links section for more information.

It also includes framework compliant temporary special offers from suppliers which expire automatically after three months.