Community Independence Services

Tender description

The Community Independence Service is a service providing nursing and therapy-led rapid response and community based rehabilitative support to mainly older people experiencing an unplanned issue in their care. Its remit does not include core district nursing and therapy services provided in the inner London area. The CIS service is currently delivered by a provider partnership pursuant to a 22 month contract with a core value of £9.08m in 2017/18. The current contract is due to come to an end on 31 July 2018. This provides notification that NHS Central London Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), on behalf of itself and associate commissioners NHS Hammersmith and Fulham CCG and West London CCG, are issuing a Direct Award of a short term contract to the incumbent service provider of the Community Independence Services (CIS). The interim contract will be for an 8 month period to align this service contract end date with wider NHS contracting, which in 2016/17 moved to a two year contracting focus, with almost all wider NHS trust contracts currently planned to run to 31 March 2019 (subject to amendment). Contracting authorities are also planning for the alignment of this contract to published plans in each of the CCG areas for delivering integrated care systems and the Five Year Forward View agenda. Each CCG has plans to introduce new integrated care models from April 2019, moving to formally contracted arrangements from April 2020 at the latest. The contract for this service will therefore include an option to extend for up to a further 12 months to enable the alignment of the contract into the wider integrated care procurement. The new models of care being developed will establish integrated pathways in regard to physical health, social care and mental health to deliver holistic patient care. This interim contract ensures a continuity of essential service provision to the local population whilst new integrated care models are developed over the course of the contract in each CCG area, and therefore the CCGs have assessed that the incumbent provider is the only capable provider at this time.