Arden & GEM CSU Category Management Procurement Support

The NHS spends c£16 billion a year on medicines. Driving better value from medicines spend is central to ensuring financial sustainability.

To support these ambitions, NHS England has embarked on a Medicines Value Programme (MVP) to deliver better value from its investments in medicines and has prioritised the management of therapeutic medicines. To meet the objectives of the MVP NHS England is seeking to implement Category Management, as a strategic end-to-end process for therapeutic medicines, which aligns business goals and requirements with supply market capability. The approach will enable NHS England to transform the long-term value achieved from money spent on medicines and provide: 1. A systematic and on-going appraisal of efficiency opportunities on a category basis, which could include a range of initiatives such as; commercial access agreements, therapeutic reviews, commissioning policies or exploring new models for procurement for specialised medicines 2. Processes to manage risk and identify any system failure 3. Model to identify the appropriate use of incentives and how best to transact (e.g. CQUINs) to drive system changes