Health services

Tender description

Castle Point and Rochford and Southend Clinical Commissioning Group wish to pilot a 12 month Falls Early Intervention Vehicle (EIV) service targeting appropriate falls patients, increasing ambulance see and treat rates, reducing ambulance conveyances and A&E attendances, and reducing non-elective admissions to Southend Hospital. The aim of the scheme is to safely care for people in their own homes, where an acute admission to hospital may have previously been provided. This model will further prevent unnecessary hospital re-admissions and would positively impact on patient quality and safety. The vehicle will be staffed by a trained Paramedic and an Occupational Therapist, attending to 999 calls with a ‘falls’ related dispatch code for ‘Green 1 — 4’ and ‘Red 1’ responses in the Castle Point and Rochford CCG and Southend CCG areas. This contract will be directly awarded to East of England Ambulance Service. The EIV service will be provided by a multi-disciplinary team consisting of an EEAST Paramedic and a Community Occupational Therapy (OT) in operation from 7:00 to 19:00, 7 days a week. The EIV will deliver streamlined, cohesive, patient focused care enabling rapid access to support services. It is expected that the service will have the capacity to respond to between 5 and 8 calls per day, with the potential to respond to more depending on distance between calls and ‘Red 1’ response demand. The service will include lifting patients and carrying out medical interventions at home where possible, providing patients with holistic assessments, equipment and referrals to appropriate services to support and maintain patients within their place of residence, therefore reducing admissions and improving the patient's experience. The provider will have the ability to act as a conduit between acute, community, social care, voluntary, and preventative services for falls patients. The service will: — Issue community equipment at scene, — Provide OT assessments for early prevention mitigations, — Undertake falls referrals, — Source / request care packages to support patients at home, — Undertake patient frailty reviews, — Increase early intervention and prevention of deterioration, — Increase the number of patients remaining at home with support, — Reduce repeat fallers, — Reduce attendances to A&E by ~584 over 12 months, — Reduce emergency admissions by ~176 over 12 months. The incumbent provider for blue light 999 ambulance responses in South East Essex is East of England Ambulance Service Trust (EEAST). Essex Partnership University Trust (EPUT) is the South East Essex provider for the community services the early intervention vehicle team will be referring patients in to and utilising. There is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the service can only be provided through adaptation of the current blue light response, satisfying the Procurement Contract Regulations 2015 Reg32(2)(b):—2) Where the works, supplies or services can only be supplied by a particular economic operator — ii) competition is absent for technical reasons. Due to interdependencies between assignment of the vehicle and referral back to main control room for conveyance requirements, effectively there is only one capable provider (EEAST). EEAST will work with EPUT to deliver this service to patients within the Castle Point and Rochford and Southend footprint for a period of 1 year as a pilot project. This project will help to support decision making regarding the future procurement of this service model. Please note that the publication of this notice does not commit either Castle Point and Rochford or Southend CCG to any further procurement process and they reserve the right not to procure these services in the future.