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Procurement within the NHS is attracting increasing research and policy interest. However, most of the emphasis has been on the buyer (the NHS), with less attention paid to the behaviour of suppliers (often pharmaceutical companies). For medical devices very little is publicly documented about procurement and even less about the supplying industry.

This paper uses a case study of artificial hip prostheses to indirectly explore how procurement choices are made within the NHS. We recognise the roles of the various players (patient, surgeon and hospital procurement department) when purchases are made from a potentially highly oligopolistic supplying industry.