Founded in 2001, NHS Professionals has grown to become the largest bank staff provider to our beloved health service. Uniquely owned by the Department of Health and Social Care their mission is to reduce the NHS’s reliance on external recruitment which is costly and can lead to significant delays in patient care. Now working with 140 NHS Trusts across the country, if you have spent in any time in a hospital in the past few years, there is a good chance an NHS Professional bank staff member has been a part of yours or your loved one’s care.

When we approached NHS Professionals in 2021 we knew that this would be a different sort of challenge for us. After all, temporary bank staff could be needed at any time or any place and so we had to ensure a seamless order process with rapid lead times to ensure their placement could begin immediately.

Firstly however, we needed to ensure they had the right uniform. NHS Professionals took advantage of our contract manufacturing service, where we designed, sampled, tweaked and produced a unique range of tunics, trousers, dresses and scrubs for them. These garments need to be hard wearing, comfortable and able to be laundered at the highest possible temperatures, as well as compliant to the stringent requirements of our health service. After several design and sample iterations we finally settled on a range of over 500 unique product SKUs, all manufactured by our global partners to ensure optimal value. One unique variant requirement was specific trim colours for the tunics, scrubs and dresses. This is to indicate which department the bank staff professional works in so they are identifiable by fellow staff and patients alike.

Our next challenge was how to guarantee stock availability at all times. Given the rapid nature of this new customer, we decided that the best approach was to create a new NHS Professionals specific warehouse, both physically and digitally within our ERP system, to optimise speed of despatch and inventory management. We reorganised our pick and pack operation at our site in Manchester, created a new workstation terminal and employed two specialist members of staff to facilitate this. We now had the infrastructure to facilitate same day despatch for all orders placed before 12:00pm and next day for after that. In 2024, we averaged 99.60% of same or next day despatch for NHS Professionals.