Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2016-03-19
Buyer: Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council
Country: UK
Region: Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 85000000 | 85100000: Health services | 85110000: Hospital and related services | 85120000: Medical practice services | 85140000: Miscellaneous health services
Estimated value: 14022074 EUR
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: 0-5 Public Health services — including Health Visiting, Family Nurse Partnership, Smoking in Pregnancy and universal Healthy Start vitamin distribution.
The Health Visiting Service works across a number of stakeholders, settings and organisations to lead delivery of the Healthy Child Programme 0-5 (HCP), a prevention and early intervention universal service for children and families.
The Smoking in Pregnancy service offers women who smoke and their families support to stop smoking and maintain a smoke-free home environment..
The Healthy Start scheme provides vitamin supplements for families on low incomes including to pregnant women and women with a child less than 12 months of age.
All families with a child aged 0-5 years and all pregnant women currently resident in the local authority area must be offered the HCP.
Responsibility for Health Visiting and FNP services novated to the local authority from NHS England on 1.10.2015. This left only 6 months until the existing contract was due to expire (31.3.2016). Given the short time these services have been under the control of the local authority, it is deemed an impossibility to carry out a robust commissioning process in order to ensure safe, effective and efficient service provision. A procurement exercise at this point would not allow for a sufficient mobilisation period in the event of a new provider taking over the contract and the risk of destabilising current service provision is high with potential repercussions for 1 000s of children and their families across Doncaster.
In order to ensure maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness of all local authority commissioned services for children, young people and families, alignment of early year's services must be considered. Integrating service elements will enable efficiencies to be made by better pooling resources thereby reducing the potential for duplication and creating a partnership offer for families that is easier for them to understand and access. The Learning and Opportunities directorate are currently in the process of developing their 0-19 offer with a view to implementing the new structure in June 2016. Public Health would like to seize this opportunity and explore integrating service delivery elements. This however, will not be possible if the Health Visiting and Smoking in Pregnancy elements of this services are required to go out to tender before April 2016.
The local authority will enter into a contract with the current provider (RDaSH) for as a short a period as possible to enable the continuation of the robust commissioning work already under-way with the intention of ensuring the service has been re-procured and awarded in accordance with Regulations within the next 24 months. This would mean a start date for the new contract as of 1.4.2018.


Award value: 14022074