Before You Cut Staff, Consider
Non-Salary Cost Reduction

Welcome to Alliance Focus, VHA’s online magazine. In this issue, we are pleased to bring you information on an important and timely VHA Supply Chain service: Non-Salary Cost Reduction. By utilizing proven supply chain management processes in today’s tough economic climate, you can reduce “stuff, not staff” and protect your most valuable resource: your people.

Just as important, non-salary cost reductions can also help you meet your ultimate goal of improving patient care. Time and again, we see the paths of cost savings and quality patient care intersecting because access to the newest technologies and treatments requires capital in good times or bad. The bottom line is that you must be financially strong to be clinically strong.

As you read Alliance Focus, I hope you’ll see there is a world of options to explore before one single job is put at risk. Inside these pages, you’ll read how many VHA members already are taking advantage of enormous cost reductions in order to save jobs – and lives. Before you consider staff reductions, you owe it to your people and your patients to explore VHA’s Non-Salary Cost Reduction approach.

Scott Downing
Executive Vice President, Supply Chain Services