Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2016-07-09
Buyer: Arden and GEM CSU
Country: UK
Region: NORTH WEST (ENGLAND)
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 85100000: Health services
Submission deadline: 2016-08-10
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: NHS Arden and Greater East Midlands CSU (NHS AGCSU) on behalf of NHS England (referred to as the Commissioner) is inviting suitably qualified and experienced providers to deliver NHS GP Health Service.
NHS Arden and Greater East Midlands CSU (NHS AGCSU) on behalf of NHS England (referred to as the Commissioners) is inviting suitably qualified and experienced providers to deliver NHS GP Health Service.
NHS England is commissioning the NHS GP Health service to support Practitioners working in general practice who may be suffering from mental ill-health including stress and burnout and supporting those wishing to return to clinical practice after a period of ill health. It is part of a wider package of support for general practice set out in the General Practice Forward View (1) published April 2016. It is part of the Workforce 2020 plan (2) which has been jointly established with Health Education England (HEE), the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the British Medical Association's (BMA) General Practitioners Committee (GPC) has 3 key strands:
Increasing pressures in general practice are cited by the RCGP and GPC as a key reason for GPs leaving the profession, with increasing numbers of GPs allegedly looking towards early retirement. A BMA Tracker survey showed that 74 % of GPs described their workload as ‘unmanageable’ (3). The BMA have created a ‘heat map’ to illustrate the scale of the problem across England (4).
A Medical Protection Society survey of more than 600 UK members revealed that 85 % have experienced mental health issues, with common issues being stress (75 %), anxiety (49 %) and low self-esteem (36 %). A 3
The Royal Medical Benevolent Fund (RMBF) surveyed 1 351 doctors in primary and secondary care and found more than 8 in 10 doctors (82 %) would not contact mainstream NHS services about mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety, due to fear of discrimination or stigma from colleagues (84 %), or would be inhibited by their ‘high achieving’ personality traits (66 %) (6).
Over the last 25 years a number of local services have developed to support doctors' access to health care. These have usually resulted from the work of interested clinicians, Primary Care Trusts or Local Medical Committees (LMCs). In Good Doctors, Safer Patients (7) the Chief Medical Officer found that doctors and dentists can face a number of barriers when dealing with health difficulties, particularly mental health and addiction problems.
In 2007 the White Paper: Trust, Assurance and Safety — the Regulation of Health Professionals in the 21
Invisible patients: Report of the Working Group on the health of health professionals, 2010 (9) was an important report by the Department of Health, which reviewed the evidence on health professionals' ill health. Based on this evidence and the 1
In December 2014 the General Medical Council (GMC) published its review of 28 doctors who had committed suicide while under the fitness to practise procedures between 2005 and 2013 (11). The review showed that many of the doctors who committed suicide suffered from a recognised mental disorder, most commonly depressive illness, bipolar disorder and personality disorder. A number also had drug and/or alcohol addictions. Other factors that may have contributed to their deaths included marriage breakdown, financial hardship, the involvement of the police and the impact of the GMC investigation. The report made 9 recommendations, 8 to the GMC and 1 externally to its stakeholders, which was to establish a National Support Service (NSS) for doctors.
Other academic work also exists looking at the reasons GPs' don't access mental health services, including Understanding doctors' attitudes towards self-disclosure of mental health (12) by Cardiff University.
The Workforce 2020 programme makes clear that there is a national workforce crisis in general practice and a need to support and retain a health GP workforce. NHS England has specific responsibilities:
— There are national workforce challenges in general practice, with retention of GPs a high priority;
— NHS England holds the National Performers List and is responsible for GP appraisals, revalidation and responding to concerns;
— NHS England commissions occupational health services for performers on the national performer list, but does not include within this service specification (13) treatment and support for health problems encountered by the Practitioner, which goes beyond the usual cohort of Occupational Health (for example needle stick injuries);