“When the nursing staff have time for patients again, we’ll have done our job.”

Daniel Vögeli, Head of Industry Solutions and CCO, offers a glimpse into a project that shows just how far the transformation has already come – and has a proposition that makes you sit up and take notice: is the outsourcing of hospital logistics really not a question of if, but simply of when?

Fifteen years – that sounds like lots of patience.

Or persistence. In healthcare, you don’t build solutions overnight. Trust is created over years, through the experience of partnerships. That is precisely what we are founded on.

Logistics isn’t exactly the most glamorous of topics…

That’s true, it’s not often that we’re associated with red carpets. But I believe the jury saw what was behind the numbers: nursing staff who now again have time for patients. A hospital that, thanks to freed-up storage space, was able to create new operating theatre capacity without any additional new construction. That’s not a logistics exercise. That’s healthcare.

How does it work in practice? What happens when a delivery arrives at Klinik Seeschau today?

The nursing staff scan a barcode at the operating theatre airlock, and that’s it. For each scheduled procedure, we’ve packed an individual case box in advance and made a just-in-time delivery. Operational procurement, ordering, warehousing, invoicing: everything runs automatically in the background. The team used to spend hours doing this. Today, it’s a scan.

That sounds like a huge difference from how things used to be. Klinik Seeschau now saves 400,000 francs per year and has reduced its logistical workload by 90 percent. What does that mean in practice for the people who work there?

Logistics in a hospital should be like electricity from the wall – it just has to work without anyone having to think about it. Nursing staff, who used to spend a significant proportion of their working hours placing orders and checking stocks, can now focus on what they were trained for: their patients. For me, achieving this with Klinik Seeschau is the real proof.

And what about the future? Where do you see healthcare logistics in ten years’ time?

Let me be clear: ten years from now, most Swiss hospitals will have outsourced their logistics. Cost pressures, shortages of skilled workers and digitalization, or bottlenecks in supply chains – the overall conditions simply make it not viable to operate logistics in-house. We’re already working on systems where consumption data flows from the operating theatre to our platform in real time, triggering replenishments fully automatically, before the nursing staff even realize that anything is running low.

Outsource everything? That’s quite a proposition. What if you’re wrong?

Cost pressures on hospitals are mounting, the shortage of skilled nursing staff is a reality, and in the long run, no hospital can afford to employ qualified staff to deal with orders and inventory management. On top of that, many hospitals are located in the middle of the cities. Expensive space currently used for storage could be put to use for patient care. And the pressure on delivery vehicles in city centers is growing, as more and more restrictions leave less and less wriggle room. With our model, we reduce the number of deliveries by up to 80 percent. This is not only financially attractive, it also contributes to the quality of life in urban areas.

In the end, it’s quite simple: Swiss Post specializes in logistics, hospitals specialize in patient care. When everyone does what they do best, everyone benefits. We’re already working on fully automated systems where consumption data flows from the operating theatre to our platform in real time. The question isn’t if, it’s when. And Swiss Post’s healthcare logistics will be playing a key role.