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plantasia
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.