Why ProCure 21 must succeed

I read with great interest the range of articles about healthcare in September’s BSj. I was especially captured by Peter Woolliscroft’s call for building services engineers and the wider industry to help him make ProCure 21 a success. In my view this might just be the most important opportunity for UK construction to change its culture for the next 20 years and we had better not mess it up.

A number of people have been trialling and proving integration and collaborative working. They can show it is a more enjoyable, more profitable and more successful way of meeting everyone’s needs, but let’s be honest, these examples are few and far between and most are still in the prototype phase. To use a car industry analogy, the new model looks good on the test track, but we’re still making the old model ‘cos that’s what everyone’s buying.

What Woolliscroft is offering is the chance to move to full production. To make the new model the norm in his part of the industry, so that everyone sees it and wants one. If this fails, the vultures will return to poo-poo integration and consolidate their norm of lowest price adversarial working on which many have grown fat at others’ expense. The current generation of change agents will be relegated to the status of alchemists proffering gold from lead when the rules of nature and science clearly prove it impossible. It will take a whole new generation of pioneers to get the industry back to where it is now, another generation that will have to climb to positions of influence and responsibility before the collaborative voices are again heard, hence the 20 years I mentioned earlier.

Not that delivery of the ProCure 21 vision as a fully effective method is going to be easy. NHS Estates are the advisors, but it’s the Trusts who are the clients and who need to be convinced. Although some are sceptical, many of them are trying to move to the ProCure 21 model. Many trusts are willing to accept the need for limited numbers of PSCPs (principle supply chain partners) with their associated integrated chains. But some are potentially working an uneasy hybrid where they believe in integration, they think, “but will you please use it to deliver this design, already developed without you”, which goes against the early involvement mantra of ProCure 21.

Procure 21 is the most important opportunity for UK construction to change its culture for the next 20 years.

And then there are the PSCPs themselves. How well have they embraced the need to collaborate with their own PSCMs (primary supply chain members) as well as the trusts? Some of the PSCPs/PSCMs have definitely got it. But on its own, that isn’t sufficient. Their size and complexity means many of their staff don’t understand the different behaviours this brave new world requires. Real success for ProCure 21 may well depend on how well they are able to change their internal culture, just as much as the leadership of NHS estates and the Trusts.

There are also PSCPs/PSCMs that some suspect only want to be part of ProCure 21 because it looks like assured turnover and profit. They could seriously damage the shaky confidence of a Trust making its first departure into the uncharted waters of integration.

How then can ProCure 21 succeed? Only if all those who are involved recognise the scale of the challenges and the significance of the prize. Nothing worth having comes easily. Everyone involved with ProCure 21 will need to be tolerant of the apparent conflicts between messages and actions that will frequently be evident, certainly in the early days. But by searching beyond the immediate behaviours to ensure the underlying beliefs and values are genuine (whilst not falling foul of those using ProCure 21 as a tactic) it should be possible to see the opportunity for what it is: a real chance to change industry culture once and for all.