Good practice and learning from Covid 19 – Marr Procurement

We cannot write about our own experience of what we learnt during the pandemic without first recognising the bravery, hard work and dedication of the extraordinary staff on the front line of the care sector. And having worked in this industry for the last 14 years, I know how hard everyone was working beforehand! Marr Procurement is a values-led business. We are now the UK’s leading health and care sector procurement organisation; we work with 42 care groups across the UK to deliver real savings.

Fast forward to late February 2020 when we were all impacted by Covid-19. Following an emergency Board Meeting, we quickly agreed we must focus on doing the right thing for our team and for our amazing clients. We immediately ensured people could work from home, we arranged furlough payments, we set up a weekly quiz to ensure everyone remained connected and periodically we sent the team a surprise gift, just to make them smile. We partnered with MIND and set up a Wellbeing Mental Health programme. We wanted to look after our clients because we knew some suppliers would profiteer, (hence the 5,000% inflation on masks), so we set up a free procurement service for various charities so they wouldn’t fall victim to unscrupulous suppliers.

Over the years we have sourced millions of PPE and we anticipated our income from PPE projects would soar. Should we profiteer and bank the unexpected windfall as so many others did? In
March 2020 we concluded it would be morally and ethically abhorrent to profiteer at a time when our clients were dealing with the crisis and so we donated every penny of PPE profit to 14 social care organisations across the UK.

We are a small business dedicated and committed to the health and care sector and are hugely proud about how we behaved during the worst crisis imaginable. We could have profiteered like so many suppliers did but we didn’t; we gave back 100% of all PPE profits to the social care sector. We looked after our team and our clients during the crisis and we properly gave back to society; as a small business, this makes all of us at Marr Procurement, feel extremely proud.