Firstly, before we dive right into the ways in which Warp It has impacted the shape and culture of the NHS and UK Healthcare in general, we want to say thank you.

We’d like to thank all of the brilliant professionals in the NHS who have supported our mission, thank you to those who bought into our reuse model, and every green champion that pursued having a Warp It reuse project installed in their healthcare facility. From our first hospital to our most recent, it is such a brilliant journey to be a part of, and the icing on the cake, winning NHS Supplier of the Year 2018, means a great deal to all of us here at Warp It.

What have been our greatest impacts?

By facilitating and tracking the internal redistribution of surplus assets, we’ve helped dozens of NHS facilities to understand the social, environmental and most crucially important to the NHS right now, financial benefits of reuse.

By reusing surplus assets within Trusts and also between Trusts, we’ve allowed customers to form mutually beneficial partnerships that perhaps didn’t exist before, all through the basis of trading surplus assets. The same partnership principle has also been extended outside of the health sector, to organisations of all shapes and sizes, many of whom are very passionate about supporting the NHS.

You’ve been the catalyst

We made the platform, but you’ve done the hard work. You’ve saved millions of pounds, you’ve saved thousands of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, you’ve saved thousands of kilos of waste from landfills, you’ve freed up space, you’ve done building commissions that don’t sweep everything ‘under the rug’, and you’ve saved huge amounts of precious time for so many staff. You’ve even coined the phrase ‘Let’s Warp It’ and turned us into a verb!

You’ve given us so much feedback that has helped to shape the platform in a way that further supports your hard work saving lives, and you’ve also given us feedback that makes us feel good and justified. You’ve told us things like ‘Every large organisation should have this’, ‘What’s not to like?’, and importantly ‘This is a fantastic service, and I wish more NHS staff would look on this to save waste and money’.

Crunching numbers...

We know you love data, perhaps being surrounded by technology, machines and clipboards all day has something to do with that. So here you have all of the pivotal NHS data as of 13/09/2018: since using Warp It, our 63 NHS partners have saved an incredible £4.06m, 700,155 kg of waste, 1.86m kg of CO², donated £68,000 worth of assets to charity, donated £50,000 worth of assets of other causes, and have claimed £143,000 worth of assets from outside of the NHS network. We have 14 NHS members who have saved over £100,000 each!

How did we get here?

The journey to becoming NHS Supplier of the Year started with our first healthcare partner, but we didn’t really begin to knuckle down on supporting the NHS until we went to an NHS sustainability workshop in Liverpool, hosted by Ian Stenton from Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospitals. This was when we saw the huge opportunity to be a sustainable support mechanism for the sector, especially as we left that event with five new partners. We made some mistakes and some of the early NHS partners were quite critical, thankfully so, as they pushed us to be better and guided us towards the changes that needed to be made.

Some more great data

Our top 20 NHS customers invest £300 a month into our service and on average they avoid £4842 a month each on procurement and skip charges, they divert 850 kg of waste from landfill, and spare 2.3 tonnes of CO² from the atmosphere.

NHS members are leveraging the system to link up with partner institutions like Universities, Voluntary Sector Organisations, Councils, and Central Government Organisations, to get and give surplus assets to each other. They’re swapping furniture, stationery, medical equipment, clinical supplies, lab equipment, vehicles and any other tangible assets that you can think of.

A case study worth mentioning

Andy Hay is the Procurement Planning Manager at NHS Tayside, he’s also one of our biggest supporters, he’s known as ‘The Warp It Guy’ on his estate, and he’s behind one of our biggest success stories. Andy believes that for reuse to really take off in the NHS, Procurement departments must take the initiative, and Facilities Management must be heavily involved. He told us “Warp it is owned by Procurement, but Facilities are really the key players in making it a success.”

NHS Tayside has recently surpassed £225,000 in savings and interestingly beyond internal claims, the largest financial saving is on admin time. Warp It has helped them restructure how they do things, and that’s a strong indicator of how useful reuse is not just from a resourceful point-of-view. Compared to some of our other members, NHS Tayside is one of the most diverse in terms of items being listed, and the list of top claimants is totally different from the top listers. They’ve got a successful Warp It ecosystem bringing benefits to all departments and that’s exactly what we’d like to see happen in every NHS facility.

In summary

We help the NHS to collaborate and use its land and buildings better, saving money, maximising asset value and liberating space. More than 20% of the NHS is on our system, and we hope to increase that because of the potential that the entire NHS has if it were all connected and sharing assets. That’s something we enjoy visualising.

We are NHS Supplier of the Year

Find out when, how, and why this happened!