Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the annual cost to the NHS is of (a) pharmaceutical drugs, (b) examination gloves, (c) disposable aprons, (d) other medical consumables, (e) medical scanning devices and (f) other equipment.

Expenditure on medicines in 2018/19 financial year in England in primary care and secondary care was £15.4 billion.

All National Health Service trusts as autonomous entities record their data locally. NHS Improvement and NHS Digital have been working to centralise purchase order and invoice data centrally to provide better national data visibility on common goods and supplies (everyday hospital consumables; high value healthcare consumables; common goods and capital equipment). Spend is reported by NHS trusts on the NHS Spend Comparison Service for England; common goods and supplies contains £5.6 billion of expenditure. Reviewing the categories requested below within the spend comparison service shows:

Expenditure on examination gloves for 2018/19 financial year was £41.7 million; expenditure on disposable aprons was £4.9 million and expenditure on medical scanning devices was £359.5 million. There are no categories on the Spend Comparison Service for ‘other medical consumables’ and ‘other equipment’.

The figures above will exclude any spend not reported through the Spend Comparison Service.

NHS Trusts are autonomous entities who will make their own procurement decisions based on local pressures and demands. Collaborative procurement is promoted across healthcare to make the most of the NHS budget ensuring value for money is delivered. NHS trusts work with other local hospitals, regional procurement hubs and the national framework organisations that the Department has established - Commercial Medicines Unit and NHS Supply Chain Coordination Ltd for medicines and common goods and supplies respectively – to purchase these supplies.

NHS trusts will make individual decisions on what to do with products which expire, are decommissioned or are at the end of their lifecycle. The decision will depend on the value of the asset and whether the asset has any ongoing use. There are charities which will collect expired products for use in third world countries and there are also specialist auctioneers who will sell equipment with residual life and use. Quite often old imaging equipment will be purchased by vets.