The ministry now has eleven warehouses full of protective equipment, mainly mouth masks, but also aprons, gloves, splash goggles and coats. In total, 2.5 billion products were ordered last year. Less than 15 percent of this has been supplied to healthcare so far.
One problem is that the hundreds of millions of mouth masks left over are only valid for two to five years. With the current demand, only a fraction has been sold by then. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has invested a total of more than two billion euros to purchase the items.
Professional buyers, who worked together with the ministry through the so-called National Consortium Tools (LCH), warned in June that additional orders were no longer necessary, because the regular supply routes were then restarted. VWS took over under the motto better safe than sorry another decision. ‘The pipeline was then completely filled up again,’ said one involved.
Decide quickly
‘We had to make decisions in no time in a very uncertain time,’ says Mark Frequin, the director general who managed the purchasing organization from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. “It’s true that buyers warned about too many orders, but we just couldn’t run the risk of another shortage in the event of a third wave. Never again; that thought was very much alive in everyone. It is easy to explain what we have done. ‘
Demand has now fallen sharply compared to the heyday of the crisis. Many healthcare institutions buy their protective equipment from their original suppliers and not from the LCH of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. There is now overcapacity worldwide for most products, only less for gloves.
Mondmaskers
Minister Tamara van Ark (Medical Affairs) reported earlier this month to the House of Representatives that the current stock consists of a total of 1.3 billion items. After inquiry through de Volkskrant it has turned out that there is also ‘non-free stock’ on top of that. It consists of more than 800 million products that ‘cannot (yet) be delivered’, according to VWS in a written statement. ‘This concerns, for example, mouth masks that still have to be inspected because information is missing with regard to the certificate.’
Moreover, new stuff is still coming in. This is because the ministry has concluded contracts through LCH with Dutch producers such as Auping and Afpro, which will continue for another year and are good for millions of extra masks.
Dump prices
The ministry has limited options to reduce the stocks of more than 2 billion items. Within the EU, the ministry cannot use dumping prices, because that would be a form of market disruption. Minister Van Ark has already given away free things to the severely affected Suriname and homeless people and other people are also eligible for free help, but that does not mean that the mountain of mouth caps has disappeared.
One option is to destroy some of the stocks purchased last year. According to experts in the market, that would be wise in order to save on the costs of storage. Minister Van Ark is not that far yet, according to her letter to Parliament. ‘I want to avoid as much as possible that parts of the emergency stock have to be destroyed, as happened with emergency stock in neighboring countries.
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