Blog: Price and quality top considerations for procurers, but when will sustainability come in?
When procurers look at supplies, they focus overwhelmingly on quality and price. However, many at the recent Healthcare Procurement Summit in Brussels argued that these can’t be the only two benchmarks – sustainability has to come into a much greater focus too.
One Dutch procurer told HBI that sustainability has become much more of a hot topic due to the pandemic. Scarcity for disposable medical devices like masks and gloves meant practitioners needed to take more care about when they disposed of something, and when they’d keep wearing it. Supply chain issues, and the growing political pressure for environmentalism, have not gone away.
But as procurement expert and founder/CEO of healthcare procurement price aggregator XMED iQ Dieter Zocholl memorably tells HBI – a business cannot get out of bankruptcy by claiming it has been sustainable.
But such is the way of these developments. The advent of commercial flying and cars saw a product purely for the consumption of the rich, and now it is cheap enough for most. In the same way, these technologies and new energies will become cheaper as they develop. Greater pushes for price transparency may also yield the necessary funds to pursue more sustainable goods. At that point procurers must make sustainability a top concern. For now, quality and price reign.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Joe Quiruga or call 0207 183 3779.
