Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2019-12-17
Buyer: NHS Blackpool Clinical Commissioning Group
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 85100000: Health services
Estimated value: 141973713 GBP
EU fund: ESF

Technical requirements: Provision of a regional, integrated NHS 999 and NHS 111 patient service including provision of clinical and technical triage to a point of transfer from initial Health Advisor initial assessment onwards. The new NHS111 contract will enable greater and faster integration with the NHS 999 contract for the North West.
Provision of an integrated, regional 999 and NHS 111 patient contact and clinical support service, providing the clinical and technical triage and referral to the provision of NHS emergency and urgent care services. The regional core service will provide all call handling for both 999 and NHS 111 to a point of transfer of the call if appropriate (where a Clinical Assessment Service is in place) from initial health advisor initial assessment onwards.
The service will also play a key role in the provision or onward referral of modular integrated urgent care (IUC) services such as primary care (including out of hours services), community services and mental health at both North West and footprint level as locally determined.
The NW integrated service will ensure continued provision of a core regional telephony infrastructure with enhancements:
— to deliver at scale a more sophisticated caller-routing interface that permits early streaming of identifiable groups of callers to alternative services from both 999 and NHS 111,
— to enable the use of a potential future patient management database that can utilise information from other sources (e.g. frailty flags from the GP record) to support the streaming of callers to the most appropriate Clinical Assessment Service.
The service will operate to a regional set of minimum core requirements to meet national specifications, with rights reserved by the contracting authority for further additions during the contract terms including the responsibilities of the ambulance service as a category one provider.
The service will support patient call flows at an agreed list of interface points using automated technological solutions, governed by standardised principles and responsibilities to safeguard transfers of care from the Core 999/NHS 111 service to Clinical Assessment and/or other services to best meet the patients need.
The service is for the provision of core 999/ NHS 111 call handling services and interface as appropriate to modular integrated urgent care (IUC) services as may be defined by the contracting authorities participating in this procurement and as may be developed with other health care providers.
The stated contract value of 141 973 713 GBP assumes the 5-year contract plus a potential 2-year extension for the core elements (7 years in total). Further modular elements may be added in due course once determined. Further inflation may also be required subject to agreement between the contracting authority and the provider.
The core service will commence mobilisation from Oct 2020 with modular elements phased in by agreement over the lifetime of the contract by CCGs and successor ISCs, as plans develop for local urgent care system integration.
The core contract is being directly awarded to a single provider assessed to be the only organisation, currently providing 999 services with sufficient appropriate capability to deliver the requisite scale, expertise and integrated solution. The contract is necessarily replacing the current NHS 111 contract to be able to best integrating with the health services of the 999 contract to ensure a sustainability and resilience.



Winner: North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust
Award value: 141973713
Number of bids: 1