£50m deal to help health authority slash printing costs

South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority (SYSHA) has signed a £50m five-year deal to help reduce its printing and paper spending.

The authority expects to save £15m through the deal, which it claims is the first of its kind in the UK.

John Burton, South Yorkshire’s strategic procurement liaison manager, says the contract will change the way the authority uses printers and paper.

‘Currently we have no real idea of the cost of the copy we are using, we just know that people have printers on their desks and we want to make sure they are used as efficiently as possible,’ he said.

The contract to run the service has been awarded to Xerox Global Services, and will cover all 18 NHS organisations in the health authority area.

As part of the deal, each trust will have access to a central print office, enabling them to process large orders more efficiently, says Burton.

‘If someone needs large amounts of one type of document or another, they will be able to order those automatically from a central repository on the SYSHA’s intranet,’ he said.

Gartner analyst Jonathan Edwards says the deal is likely to be watched closely by other NHS authorities.

‘It is another example of the NHS outsourcing a business process,’ he said.

‘A lot of other authorities have used shared services for things such as payroll and finance, so this kind of thing is definitely part of a bigger trend.’

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