British Healthcare System - Global Sales Mentor | Zach Selch

11 Jun 2020 · 3 min

Watch on YouTube

2:30

In this brief presentation Zach Selch outlines the United Kingdom’s healthcare market as a promising target for international vendors. He starts with macro‑level data – a population of about 65 million, a $2.5 trillion economy, roughly $44 K per‑capita GDP and 9 % of GDP spent on health care – and notes the perception that the NHS functions as a single, centralized buyer. He then clarifies that the NHS is actually a network of almost 150 autonomous trusts, each covering a region’s hospitals and roughly 8,000 GP practices, and each trust has its own board, purchasing manager, IT manager and medical leadership. Consequently, selling into the NHS means dealing with about 150 distinct hospital groups rather than a monolithic national entity. Selch also explains that the NHS issues national guidelines and runs a few high‑visibility “pet projects” at any time, such as a patient‑experience czar who advises trusts on improving service. These centrally‑driven initiatives heavily influence trust‑level purchasing decisions. The segment ends with a brief sales‑oriented call‑to‑action encouraging viewers to contact the speaker’s team when they are ready to expand internationally.

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Let's talk a little bit about the British healthcare system. Country, 65 million people, $2.5 trillion in GDP, about $44K per capita GDP, about 2% growth. 9% of the GDP is being spent on healthcare. Centralized healthcare seems to be a single buyer. Looks like a fantastic market to go into. What else do we need to know about this? Well, keep in mind everything in the UK for the most part is related to the NHS, the National Health Service. People have said that the NHS is the closest thing the Brits have to a national religion at this point. Everybody loves it. Everybody wants to support it, build it up. One of the big arguments for Brexit actually was that people said more money could be channeled into NHS and it would be managed better. It isn't exactly clear that that's going to be the case. How does the NHS work? We think of national healthcare systems or ministries of health as being centralized. So we'd like to think, well, you go to some office in London, you get a purchase order, boom, you cover the country. It doesn't quite work like that. There are almost 150 trusts. The trusts cover different parts of the country. About 8,000 general practitioner offices fall within those trusts. The hospitals fall within those trusts. And those trusts each have a board, each have a purchasing manager, each have an IT manager, each have a head medical officer, those type of things. So essentially you are selling to about 150 hospital groups around the country when you sell to the NHS in England. Now on the other side of that, the NHS does issue guidelines, and what I've found is they typically have one or two pet projects going on at any given time. So for instance, a few years ago they were looking at improving the patient So they had a patient experience czar who sat in London, whose job was to give advice to different regional trusts how they could improve their patient experience. And those guidelines, that advisory, was actually extremely important for the decision-making of the various trusts.
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