High profile backing for GS1 drive

At the 2016 GS1 UK Healthcare Conference in London, delegates heard from speakers including Pat Mills, the Department of Health’s commercial director, on the ongoing work to embed GS1 standards throughout the NHS in England in line with the DH’s eProcurement Strategy, published in April 2014. This mandated that any service or product procured by an English NHS acute Trust comply with the standards – one of the most obvious representations of which is on barcodes – ‘to enable Trusts to manage their non-pay spending by adopting master procurement data, automating the exchange of such data, and benchmarking their procurement against other Trusts and healthcare providers’. One of six ‘demonstrator site’ Trusts to provide a speaker at the 2016 GS1 UK national conference to report on their progress to date was Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Shortly after, HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to the Trust’s associate director, Commercial and Procurement, Chris Slater, and to head of Healthcare at GS1 UK, Glen Hodgson. 

In unveiling the DH’s eProcurement Strategy in April 2014, the then UnderSecretary of State for Health, Dr Dan Poulter, explained that it would establish the GS1 coding and PEPPOL (Pan European Public Procurement On-Line) standards throughout the healthcare sector and its supply chains, introducing a requirement that any service or product procured by an NHS acute Trust in England comply. The initial deadline set for compliance at a service and product level is 2019/2020. 

GS1 is ‘a global non-profit-making organisation which sets standards that have provided a common foundation for business since the first barcode was scanned over 40 years ago’. Having introduced the GS1 barcode in 1974, the organisation’s aim continues to be ‘to bring efficiency and transparency to the supply chain using standards already used by a reported one million plus companies’ – in areas ranging from retailing to foodservice. In the UK, GS1 standards are managed by GS1 UK, one of 112 independent, not-for-profit GS1 organisations worldwide – which is helping the DH drive implementation of GS1 identifiers and barcodes across the NHS, its supply chain, and ‘solutionproviders’, at a ‘product, place, and person’ level.