Blogs / 17.12.2019

Our commitment to delivering public value to the NHS

By Steve Cenci, Managing Director, Compass UK&I Healthcare

We all know the NHS is struggling to meet the nation’s healthcare needs with the funding available. At Medirest, we’re particularly aware of this because we’re right alongside our public sector colleagues on the frontline, living the struggle every day. 

Medirest Driving Value and Efficiency in Healthcare

As a result, we’re continually asking ourselves how, as the UK’s leading provider of food, hospitality and support services in acute hospitals, can we support the NHS as it strives to extract the best value from its income. 

Obviously, when you think of value, it’s natural to think about price, so we draw on all our experience and scale as part of Compass Group to deliver services at the lowest viable price point. We only enter into contracts we know we can sustain through to the end, understanding how vital it is to be able to rely on partners in this age of high-profile supplier collapses. 

But a competitive price is just one small aspect of how we deliver value to the NHS. Our true mission is to support the outstanding patient experience that promotes health, and this is driven by our performance with heart ethos. 

For us, a value offering is all about helping patients to live better. We recruit people who understand that the job they’re doing directly impacts on patients’ recovery — supporting healing with nutritious food, a hygienic care environment and smooth, stress-free portering. The people who bring a few moments of normality to patients in an alien environment.

Sustainability is key to our value; we make sure our high-quality services are reliably repeatable through seeking out and sharing best practice across Medirest. We draw knowledge from our international Compass family, our best performing sites, market insight work, patient research and our industry experts. Then, spearheaded by our business excellence team, we make sure every one of our people puts that best practice into action to get things right first time, making sure that all our NHS contracts benefit from our latest knowledge and efficiency practices. 

Enhancing the Patient Experience with Innovative Technology Solutions

To keep us at the leading edge of change and improvement, we also find and welcome innovative, disruptive technology into our systems and services. From revolutionary patient dining systems to investing in apps that create a better patient experience, we look to technology to underpin our search for value. And every advance we make, every piece of expertise we have, we share openly with our NHS clients in a spirit of partnership. 

The introduction of the Public Value Framework has pushed conversations about value to the top of the NHS agenda.

 

Find out how we deliver value to the NHS by downloading our response to the framework, ‘Taking the Public Value Framework forward’, today.