Our role in history

The Ministry of Health was created in 1924 and was called at the time the Ministry of Hygiene, Assistance and Social Security. The need to centralise the supply processes of the above mentioned Ministry gave rise in 1930 to an incipient Purchasing Office that covered the needs for all kinds of products at the same time providing the basis for what, years later, would become the Central Procurement Office known as CENABAST.

In the year 1952, upon having created the National Health Service (S.N.S.), the Purchasing Office went on to be called the Procurement Office whose aim was to ' attend to the general procurement of products for all the establishments of the S.N.S. '. We could mention as some of its responsibilities the areas of textiles, pharmaceuticals, office and printing supplies, canteen furniture and others, and the office even came to have its own cotton and gauze production plants. In 1979 a new change took place in the state system. The Decree Law Nº2.763 created the National Health Services System (S.N.S.S.) and gave rise to the Central Procurement Office of the S.N.S.S. The functional role assigned to it was to supply medicines and clinical inputs to the sector. In 1992 the first diagnoses were carried out to determine the operational efficiency of the institution and of the health sector’s procurement programme. Soon after, the studies carried out in order to analyse the characteristics of the product market necessary for the health services. The results determined the new role for CENABAST: to become an intermediary organism for the public health sector. In 1995 CENABAST began to operate under a new modality, with 33 products involving the participation of hospitals in Regions V and Metropolitan. The first procurement took place through the system of electronic tenders. Within this business model, the organisation directly estimated the necessary quantities of products to be bought in accordance with the available past information and thus buy sufficient stock, which was then sold to the hospitals and health establishments. Finally, aiming at making known the procurement needs of the sector, the challenges imposed by the health reform process (AUGE) and the available financial resources, CENABAST implemented an operating model in 2004, becoming an institution that provides the establishments of the Public Health Sector with medicines and medical supplies, acting by means of a mandate or in representation of these, via agreements with the health establishments charging a commission for the services provided by CENABAST.

Annually, CENABAST carries out a demand consolidation process for all the health establishments that make their purchases via CENABAST, on the basis of a referential basket of approximately 2,400 products, in accordance with the policies of medicine procurement of the Ministry of Health and client needs for one year (purchase plan). This business model is then based on scale purchase programs which, in turn, become very useful for a better access and financing of essential medicines.