ABHI Position on the PPIB Tool

Background

The Purchase Price Index and Benchmark Tool (PPIB) collates and analyses spend data from NHS Trusts in England & Wales. The tool’s objectives are to:

• Enable trusts to be better informed about their respective product purchase prices
• Provide a comparable benchmark for Trusts to help identify variation in pricing across suppliers, categories and products
• Improve the quality of purchasing data, in a nationally consistent fashion, to support initiatives that drive out cost through better sourcing, greater aggregation and increased collaboration, such as the Nationally Contracted Products programme.

Recommendations for the compelling and effective application of the PPIB tool

ABHI and its members support transparency.

Industry recognises that the PPIB tool can provide useful management information to aid decision making when utilised appropriately. However, members feedback that a Trust uses the tool to simply seek the lowest price in the market as shown by the benchmark index. This highlights the limitations of crude price comparison in a system as complex and complicated as NHS purchasing.