PMD153 - TURKISH PUBLIC PROCUREMENT SYSTEM FOR MEDICAL DEVICES: IS THERE ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT WHEN VALUING QUALITY?

Abstract

Law No 4734, Law of Public Tender, which was implemented in 2002, establishes the principles and procedures of any procurement process held by public authorities and institutions in Turkey governed by public law and using public funds. Although the Law was amended in 2008 to emphasize factors beyond price that take into account quality and the overall value of the products as an award criteria, the current procurement practices in Turkey do not fully cover those factors. The purpose of this paper is to assess the current public procurement processes for medical devices in Turkey, analyze areas to improve and propose an approach which considers quality and long-term health outcomes towards a value-based procurement. The paper consists of a detailed critical analysis of the Turkish Law of Public Tender, an assessment of previous tender commissions’ decisions which considers best quality-price ratio, and interviews with policy makers as well as procurers in Turkey. The results demonstrate that whilst the current culture of making tender decisions is based solely on price across the country, in any of three procurement methods, including open procedure, restricted procedure, and negotiated procedure, there is a modest upward trend in the execution of non-price factors as award criteria. However, there is a need for contracting authorities to be able to express those factors in monetary terms with assigned weights to put the Law’s article into practice. Even though the Turkish Law of Public Tender supports the inclusion of non-price factors into the decision-making process when evaluating medical devices, there remain numerous concerns of contracting authorities that need to be addressed to reach a justified decision.