Supply Route

NHS Supply Chain manages the procurement of thousands of products vital to the everyday running of trusts, hospitals and healthcare organisations. To ensure you receive the products required, we use the following delivery methods:

These products are stocked in our national and regional distribution centres. We are able to deliver within a standard 48 hours lead time for all products, subject to preferred delivery days.

eDirect enables us to offer products we do not currently stock in our warehouses. eDirect products are ordered through NHS Supply Chain but are delivered directly to you by the supplier or a courier. Some products have longer lead times than our standard 48 hours so will be delivered by the supplier or courier subject to the confirmed lead time.

eDirect products will be invoiced by NHS Supply Chain directly to your finance department. These items will be consolidated into one invoice along with the rest of the items you order.

Blue Diamond products are ordered through NHS Supply Chain, but are not stocked in our warehouses. They are delivered to us, consolidated with the rest of your order and then delivered to you. Some products have lead times longer than our standard 48 hours so will be delivered subject to your preferred delivery days and confirmed lead time.

Some of the products we offer are via a “National Framework Contract” whereby you order these products directly with the supplier, quoting the Framework contract number and associated product codes. Please note that such orders are transacted outside of NHS Supply Chain’s normal ordering system meaning all liaisons are done directly between the customer and the supplier.

All such contracts are prefixed “NF” and all related product codes begin “N1”. Details on all our Framework contracts can be found on our Online Catalogue via the “Quick Links”, see our Useful Links section for more information.

For further information please contact your Customer Relationship Manager or Customer Services Advisor.

As these products are not physically stocked in our warehouses, they may be subject to different delivery lead times to our stocked range of products.

If the lead delivery time varies from our standard 48 hours, this will be identified via our online catalogue or when you are placing an order using our online ordering system.

Please check this carefully prior to placing or checking out your order via the Online Catalogue and Ordering System.

To be able to handle your phone calls in the quickest and most efficient way it’s important to have key pieces of information to hand. These are all available on your Printed Advice Note (PAN) and will help our Customer Service teams answer your questions.