NI-CO welcomes the new year with the addition of 2 new contracts to our existing DG Reform portfolio which will allow opportunities for NI public practitioners to share best practice with their counterparts in Europe. The first project will see a former Divisional Director within the Northern Ireland Central Procurement Directorate heading to Greece to lead a 26 month project designed to support the transition of Greece’s national central health procurement agency (EKAPY) into an efficient, flexible and focused private sector entity, centrally managing and optimizing public healthcare sourcing, procurement, supply chain and logistics, while supporting the reach of its health procurement targets. As well as offering internationally recognised procurement training courses for EKAPY staff, the project will introduce standardised operating procedures and an integrated Pan-Health Service coding system as well as developing, testing and implementing new digital solutions for the end to end management of supply chains. NI-CO Chief Executive, Graeme McCammon, commented ‘ NI-CO have had the pleasure of working with EKAPY since June 2018 and while excellent progress has been made in many areas, staffing changes coupled with the current pandemic have presented operational challenges for the Agency. Now with the new EKAPY management team in place we are confident that together we will be able to make the necessary changes to ensure that EKAPY becomes the Centre of Expertise in Health Procurement for Greece.’

 

The second DG Reform programme to commence in early 2021 will be based in Croatia and will focus on the development of new methodologies for needs assessment and quality control in the area of social services. Led by a former Executive Director for Social Services of the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, the project will deliver support and capacity building activities under three parallel but linked work streams which will be piloted in the area of foster care. The first component is horizontal and will focus on project governance, and on monitoring and evaluation of the reform process. Component two will focus on social services assessment of need and planning for service delivery and a third component will focus on reviewing the methodology for developing standards across all programmes of care.  Although primarily working with the Ministry of Labour, Pensions System, Family and Social Policy in Zagreb, the project will encourage engagement with local stakeholders (Service providers, SWCs and service users) across Croatia to gather views and opinions on how new social services should be developed to better meet the local needs that they encounter during their daily lives. Among the project deliverables, will also be the requirement to share best practice on pandemic planning across all programmes of care in both hospitals and the community achieved during the management of the recent COVID 19 pandemic so that these can be integrated into emergency plans for future pandemics.