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Every Trust has a procurement team who manage ordering, supply delivery and storage of products in the hospital. Routine items are supplied via NHS Supply Chain from a national catalogue so if a hospital carries 2 weeks of stock on average they would have a weekly delivery of a weeks stock so that there was always a local buffer to prevent any chance of stocks running out.
Its all more complicated than that but the principle is that if hospitals have a buffer and NHSSC also has a buffer then there is a lot of resilience in the system if a supplier has production problems.What this system can't handle is demand suddenly increasing by 10000% for something usually used very rarely where local and national supply chain stocks would be limited which is why pandemic stocks are held so there is resilience nationally. As mentioned upthread the pandemic stocks expected a flu virus so gowns weren't stockpiled.
So now the whole world is chasing supplies of things that simply aren't in stock or are weeks/months away from manufacturers being able to scale up for sustained demand.
dubtap-
And if those reports of the USA gazumping shipments of PPE from the Far East are true, the chasing of supplies truly is at fever pitch.
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I read yesterday on here that nhs trusts are having trouble placing orders directly in China. My partner speaks Chinese and would be happy to volunteer help with that. Is that something that would be useful?
Stonehedge
plantasia
Its a crowd sourced initiative so its off my own back. Edit: It was a company that sparked it off originaly, Prusa in the Czech Republic came up with the design for use in their health system.
Its a really slow, unhygienic and expensive way of doing things. Its a total guess but I assume that the usual suppliers in China are in very high demand at the moment. Perhaps @dubtap has some insight into how trusts normally order PPE, its not something I have been involved with before.