Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-02-07
Buyer: NHS Tower Hamlets Clinical Commissioning Group
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 85100000: Health services | 85140000: Miscellaneous health services
Estimated value: 1607105 GBP
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: Social prescribing is a means of enabling primary care services to refer patients with social, emotional or practical needs to a range of local, non-clinical services. It involves the use of a link worker to engage patients in a process of person-centred planning to support their health and wellbeing. Generally, the link worker will signpost and support the patient to access interventions provided by the voluntary and community sector.
— provide social prescribing services that cover all GP practices within the Tower Hamlets local authority area with a minimum of 1 WTE link worker per GP network supplemented by 1 WTE senior service manager,
—— building relationships and embedded service within network VCS engagement and relationship building,
— build and maintain strong strategic relationships with the local VCS and other key partners through active marketing, communications and engagement,
NHS Tower Hamlets CCG are to contract with Tower Hamlets GP Care Group for the provision of the Service. A procurement has not been followed for these reasons:
1) The provider is expected to use a mixture of its own resources and resources leveraged from primary care practices to supplement those from the CCG in order to ensure the successful delivery of the service to a high standard and the CCG also expects that the provider will negotiate with local GPs to secure cost neutral access to office space and telephony;
2) Have access to patient records from all local GP practices to enable the service to effectively join up with other primary care services;
3) Code patient records to enable the econometric evaluation of the service by the CCG. The provider will ensure that link workers correctly use nationally agreed Snowmed codes to indicate which patients have accepted the offer of social prescribing and which patients declined after having been referred by a primary care practitioner. This allows the CCG to identify patients who have received a social prescribing intervention from its linked, pseudonymised dataset and track how the intervention may have impacted on primary and secondary care activity and cost using a range of econometric techniques. Funding for the service have been secured based on demonstrable reductions in activity and cost across primary and secondary care, and as a result, this exercise will be essential to justify the service’s continued commissioning.
In addition, the provider will be expected to report regularly on the proportion of patent records that have been correctly coded and work with the CCG to interpret data, trends and variation in performance;
4) Use data provided by the CCG to identify patients who would benefit the most from social prescribing from GP lists, and proactively invite them to participate in the scheme. Using the econometric techniques outlined above, the CCG is able to identify the patient cohorts for whom the local social prescribing scheme is having the biggest impact. To make the best possible use of resources, the provider will need to have access to receive de-pseudonymised patient identifiers and use GP patient lists to contact patients and offer them appropriate services.
For these reasons. the CCG believes that the Service can only be undertaken by Tower Hamlets GP Care Group. The CCG believes there is no market for this service and a competition is unnecessary because the provider will be expected to:
1) Use own resources to supplement those from the CCG in order to ensure the successful delivery of the service to a high standard;
2) Have access to patient records from all local GP practices to enable the service to effectively join up with other primary care services;
3) Appropriately code patient records to enable the econometric evaluation of the service by the CCG;
4) Use data provided by the CCG to identify patients who would benefit the most from social prescribing from GP lists, inviting them to participate in the scheme.


Winner: Tower Hamlets GP Care Group CiC
Award value: 1607105