Health and social work services

Tender description

The purpose of this Notice is to provide advance notice and advise the market of a forthcoming procurement for a Child Health Information Service within East Anglia. Potential providers are requested to complete an online questionnaire in order to contribute to the development of the service. A draft specification is available with the questionnaire. The questionnaire should be completed by 12:00 on Monday, 4.7.2016 and instructions on how to access it are given below. Providers completing the questionnaire may be invited to a market engagement event provisionally to be held on 8th July, between 11:00 and 13:00, but further details will be made available in due course if this is required. The Child Health Information Service (CHIS) is a patient administration service which will provide an essential function ensuring that key demographics and clinical information is held and maintained on the Child Health Information System for all children aged 0-19 years that are residents, are registered with a GP within the local population, or are the responsibility of the Local Authority. This includes children moving in and out of the area to other CHIS responsible areas or out of the country. CHIS holds individual clinical records and supports the provision of public health services for children and young people including Primary Care service, Health Visiting, School Nursing and Immunisation teams. The information will form the definitive measure of success against a wide range of outcomes including: — Immunisation coverage supported through effective provision of in-year data to support targeted intervention; — Offer and uptake of national screening programmes offered to newborn babies, i.e. Newborn Blood Spot, Hearing Screening and Newborn and Infant Physical Examination (NIPE); — Improvement of health outcomes for the 0-19 population of East Anglia and elsewhere as historically covered by this service; — Management of disease outbreak; — Achievement of the minimum standard for CHIS to enable delivery of Immunisation, Screening and Healthy Child Programmes across all local areas, resulting in effective delivery of children's public health services, improved data collection for population health measures and better records on child health facilitating clinical and family decision-making. There are currently 4 providers of the services in the area and the intention is to award 1 contract to cover Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. The contract will be the NHS Standard Contract, with an initial period of 3 years and the option to extend for up to 2 further years (maximum contract length 5 years). The current contracts all end on 31.3.2017 and the new contract will start on 1.4.2017. Staff are currently employed on the 4 existing contracts so it is likely that TUPE will apply to this procurement. The Invitation to Tender (ITT) is intended to be published at the end of July 2016. The procurement processes will be run in accordance with Schedule 3 of the Public Contract Regulations 2015. The most economically advantageous tenders derived using the criteria stated in the ITT will be successful.