Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure the NHS is not dependent on single suppliers of medical products.

Central procurement processes through NHS Supply Chain include a range of measures to prevent the dependency on single suppliers of medical products.

When designing strategies, at category and sourcing strategy stages, NHS Supply Chain completes a category risk analysis which highlights sole source or supplier dominance risk and is analysed before being accepted or rejected.

Unless there is a requirement for a unique product, NHS Supply Chain tries to avoid sole sourcing. Occasionally, a tender will only produce one response for a product, so market constraints may result in sole source. In this case NHS Supply Chain will review the market and seek new entrants where possible and relevant.

Where the procurement of a product from a sole source is unavoidable, NHS Supply Chain will conduct enhanced due diligence on sole source suppliers which could include:

- business continuity management assurances;

- tailored selection criteria; and

- contingency planning in the event that the sole supplier is unable to supply.