Four-year framework agreement with Region Midtjylland
Awarded July 2024 for sterile surgical gloves to the region’s hospitals – and, when the named manufacturer closed in 2026, a test of whether continuity had been planned for.
Update, July 2026. This article records the award as announced in July 2024. The supply arrangement has since changed: WRP Asia Pacific Sdn. Bhd. announced the wind-down of its business operations on 31 March 2026 and ceased manufacturing on 15 April 2026, with a liquidator appointed, following the surge in petrochemical raw material costs caused by the Middle East conflict (The Star, The Edge Malaysia). Sterile surgical gloves under the agreement are now supplied from the Sempermed® range, produced in Austria, for which Eastwest Medico is the official distributor in Denmark. See our sterile surgical gloves for current specifications. The record below is left as published in July 2024.
The award
In July 2024 Eastwest Medico secured a four-year framework agreement with Region Midtjylland for the supply of sterile surgical gloves to the region's hospitals, taking effect in September 2024.
The tender comprised four contracts. Eastwest Medico won one; Mölnlycke Health Care ApS, OneMed A/S and Abena A/S secured the other three. Results were published on Tenders Electronic Daily on 24 July 2024.
At the time of the award, gloves were supplied from WRP Asia Pacific Sdn. Bhd., including the Profeel® brand and WRP's Damp-Hand-Donning (DHD™) technology, which allows gloves to be donned with slightly moist hands.
Why a regional framework agreement is a meaningful test
Denmark has five health regions, and a regional framework for sterile surgical gloves is among the more demanding things a supplier can be assessed for. Three reasons:
The product class is the strictest. Sterile surgical gloves are controlled to AQL 0.65 for freedom from holes under EN 455-1, against 1.5 for examination gloves, and are gamma sterilised with the sterility assurance documentation that implies. Clinical users are surgeons, who evaluate fit and tactility directly and are not persuaded by a datasheet.
The evaluation is documentary before it is commercial. A compliant bid requires the full certification set at the stated editions, third-party test reports, and evidence of delivery capacity across the whole term. Public procurement rules mean this is assessed formally, and a gap excludes the bid rather than reducing its score.
The term is four years. A framework commits a supplier to hold specification and supply through whatever happens in between - which, as the update above records, turned out to include a manufacturer ceasing production.
What happened when the manufacturer closed
The 2026 disruption is the part of this story that is genuinely instructive, and it is why we have kept the article rather than retiring it.
When WRP wound down, the framework obligation did not change. Region Midtjylland's hospitals required sterile surgical gloves to the agreed specification on the agreed schedule, and the manufacturer named at the time of award no longer existed.
Continuity was possible because the alternative was already qualified. We are the official Danish distributor of Sempermed®, produced in Austria, whose surgical range covers latex and latex-free polyisoprene including matched double-gloving systems. Documentation for that range was in place before it was needed, not requested after.
This is the practical case for the sourcing position described in our supply disruption article: resilience is having more than one qualified route to the same specification, with the paperwork already reviewed. A substitution that requires a fresh approval cycle is not a substitution a hospital can accept mid-framework.
What is supplied now
Sterile surgical gloves from the Sempermed® range:
Key takeaways
Seventeen years sourcing and supplying medical gloves and PPE to governments, UN agencies, NGOs and healthcare systems. Writes on glove standards, quality management and responsible sourcing for institutional buyers, working from the source standards rather than secondary summaries.
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