Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2017-05-05
Buyer: The Secretary of State for Health acting through the Department of Health
Country: UK
Region: UNITED KINGDOM
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 33600000: Pharmaceutical products | 73000000 | 85121200: Specialist medical services
Estimated value: 100000 GBP

Technical requirements: This Prior Information Notice (PIN) is not a call for competition. The purpose of this PIN is to notify the interested organisations of a potential Department of Health (DH) requirement and to gather interest from organisations that may wish to bid and subsequently engage in pre tender dialogue.
The DH intends to run a procurement to appoint an organisation to provide academic research or consultancy services, the purpose of these services will be to advise the DH regarding the stockpiles of essential medicines. It is a requirement that organisations that subsequently bid for this work must be entirely impartial and independent of any influence from pharmaceutical suppliers.
DH is responsible for the security of supply of medicines and takes the lead in the prevention, mitigation and management of medicines supply problems within the UK. DH is also responsible for ensuring that plans are in place to prevent and respond to outbreaks of infectious disease and other threats to the health of the population including an influenza pandemic. As part of our on-going strategic work to ensure the continuity of medicine supplies and to ensure that supplies of medicines are available within the UK to respond to supply disruptions caused by pandemics or other emergencies, DH owns an Essential Medicines Buffer Stockpile (EMBS). The EMBS operates differently to other national stockpiles in that the suppliers who win the contracts are required to store and rotate the stock through their normal supply chain to prevent it from expiring. All the stock must be held with at least a 12 month expiry date and it must be held within the UK. At the end of the contract, suppliers must buy back the stock back from DH. The stockpile was first procured in 2009 and a second procurement exercise was carried out during 2014/2015. It is a requirement that organisations that subsequently bid for this work must be independent of the pharmaceutical industry.
Deliverable 1: A reproducible methodology, using a MCDA-based approach, to populate and update a ranked list of essential medicines for inclusion within the Essential Medicines Buffer Stock, to support procurement.
Deliverable 2: A list of essential medicines for inclusion in the EMBS, ranked by the degree to which they are deemed essential, to satisfy various budget scenarios and a method for assessing their health benefits.
Organisations that are interested in subsequently bidding for the work should refer to the details in section II.8 (Additional Information) below.
The purpose of this Prior Information Notice is to engage with interested bidders to provide an opportunity to:
1. obtain a clear understanding of what business outcomes the Department of Health (DH) requires and ask questions regarding the proposed scope of work;
2. obtain market views on how to structure the requirement to enable DH to maximise market interest, innovation and value for money.
All interested organisations should register their interest for the preliminary dialogue by emailing: Sarah.McAleer@dh.gsi.gov.uk & Rory.Constable@dh.gsi.gov.uk no later than Monday 21.5.2017 providing:
Notes of the day including all questions and answers will be made available for those who are unable to attend or dial into a briefing.
This PIN is for information only and the DH reserves the right to not commence the proposed tendering process and to not conclude any framework agreement. The information contained in this notice, including information relating to the nature and scope of the DH's requirements, the service classification of this requirement or the list of CPV codes is only indicative of DH's current thinking and is neither exhaustive nor binding and DH reserves the right at its absolute discretion to amend it at the time of issue of any further notices or at any other time. The publication of this notice in no way obliges DH to commence with any competitive tender process. The DH is not and shall not be liable for any costs incurred by those expressing any interest in participating in the market consultation exercise advertised in this notice.
Potential suppliers should note that, in accordance with Government policies on transparency, DH intends to publish the Invitation to tender (ITT) documents, and the text of any framework agreement that is concluded, subject to redactions at the discretion of DH.
Further information on transparency can be found at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/transparencyoverview
Any future procurement activity relating to this project will be conducted via BMS (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-of-health/about/procurement)