Public procurement notice: Contract Notice
Published: 2017-11-18
Buyer: NHS England
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 85100000: Health services | 85121200: Specialist medical services | 85140000: Miscellaneous health services | 85148000
Submission deadline: 2017-12-18
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: This is a requirement for the Management and Development of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP).
The contract includes delivering aspects of the management function including: commissioning, developing, quality assurance and account management of up to 40 audits and national outcome reviews per annum under the NCAPOP.
The estimated value of this contract will be between 1 000 000 GBP and 1 300 000 GBP per annum excluding VAT.
The NCAPOP aims to improve patient outcomes by stimulating quality improvement and supporting policy development and operational commissioning through the use of high quality data about the quality of care.
NHS England currently contracts with the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) to lead, commission, develop and manage NCAPOP from a number of audit providers (subcontractors / audit providers). Most of NCAPOP involves healthcare in England and Wales and, to a lesser extent, other devolved nations. The existing NHS England contract with HQIP ceases on the 31.3.2018. The new contract to manage NCAPOP will commence from 1.4.2018 and be let for a period of three years with the option to extend for an additional two years.
Besides NHS England, NCAPOP outputs are used by a number of other organisations including: NHS providers of healthcare, NHS Improvement, Care Quality Commission (CQC), Public Health England, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and third sector organisations.
NHS England relies on NCAPOP to support delivery of several corporate priorities and statutory duties, including:
— NHS Five Year Forward View ambitions on quality — To reduce variations in where patients receive care, we will measure and publish meaningful and comparable measurements for all major pathways of care by 2020. Much of the data to support this work will be drawn from NCAPOP;
— The National Information Board's strategic aims include the intention to link clinical audit data to other national data sets to enable more sophisticated analyses and insights and a broader understanding of outcomes than is currently available;
— Monitoring and stimulating quality improvement in care associated with NHS England's clinical corporate priorities, for example: audits about the quality of care in adult and child diabetes, cancer, maternity and mental health services;
— Encouraging the wide use of robust data for quality improvement of care, offering patient choice, promoting patient safety, supporting revalidation and service accreditation, commissioning, service redesign, and research;
— Supporting commissioners to identify and tackle variation through RightCare, for example the diabetes audit;
— Supporting payment mechanisms, for example best practice tariff in the national hip fracture database, stroke and cardiac audits, or evidencing national CQUIN compliance, for example the psychosis audit;
— Supporting the Government's transparency initiative through the publication of quality measures at the level of individual consultant and hospital/unit level on NHS Choices;
— Identifying and responding to serious national incidents or areas of concern, for example the new child mortality database, the learning disabilities mortality review and the national confidential enquiry into patient outcome and death; and

Eligibility requirements: This procurement exercise will be conducted via the Authority's e-tendering portal (https://nhsengland.bravosolution.co.uk/web/login.html). There will be no hard-copy documents issued to Potential Providers and all communications between Potential Providers and the Authority, including tender submissions will be through the e-tendering portal.