Bid management and bid writing

As a healthcare provider, you know that your operational and clinical staff have the detailed service knowledge and insights required to create a strong tender. However, you also know that no-one in your service teams is a trained bid writer. And all of your teams are at full stretch just delivering their ‘day jobs’. To develop a compelling bid response and to meet the tight deadlines typical of NHS and Local Authority tenders you may be looking for some help.

HealthcareBids has an impressive track record of success in writing winning NHS tenders. We will help you assemble the required information and craft it into structured, persuasive responses that answer every question comprehensively, address the service specification and make it easy for commissioners to understand your organisational strengths and the benefits you can bring to the contract.

We can work alongside an internal bid or business development team or we can manage the entire project in partnership with service teams, corporate support teams and other stakeholders.

Developing a winning healthcare tender within a few short weeks is always a challenge. Agreeing a service model, getting commitment from delivery partners, workforce modelling, financial modelling, writing responses, reviewing responses, getting sign-off, managing clarification questions, submitting the required documents – there is a lot to do!

We can provide an experienced Bid Manager to:

• Develop and manage a project plan. A dedicated, hands-on resource is essential to ensure a high quality tender is submitted on time.
• Manage a ‘kick-off’ meeting with key internal and external stakeholders to ensure everyone is fully briefed and understands their role, their deliverables and your organisation’s plans for the service.
• Work with service teams and managers to develop a service delivery model which meets the service specification, achieves required outcomes and addresses service challenges highlighted by commissioners. Our Bid Manager will also work with your teams to define ‘win themes’ which reflect your organisation’s unique strengths.
• Co-ordinate inputs from subject matter experts, bid writers, reviewers and other stakeholders, including external delivery partners.
• Ensure responses are consistent, fully address the questions being asked and faithfully present your organisation’s service vision and values in the strongest possible light.
• Manage the review and sign-off processes and the upload of all documents to the procurement portal.

We have a team of highly experienced bid writers. They will have in-depth discussions with subject matter experts (SMEs) from your organisation and external delivery partners, probing and challenging to surface the detail required to answer every question fully and with conviction. Our bid writers will also develop any diagrams required including organisation charts, process flows and mobilisation Gantt charts.

Every response will be reviewed by one of our Directors before being sent to the relevant SME for first client review and then (after the writer has addressed any comments and suggestions) to your designated review team.

Our bid writers can work on every question in a tender or can work alongside your internal bid team to provide additional resource or specific expertise. We can even just provide a ‘critical friend’ review of responses written by your own team, identifying where questions have not been fully answered or are inconsistent and highlighting opportunities to strengthen responses.

Given the very short turnaround time for NHS and Local Authority healthcare tenders, advance preparation can be extremely valuable. This is especially true for ‘critical path’ activities which can hold up other elements of the bid, such as service design and delivery partner engagement but also holds for pulling together the collateral and documents you are likely to need. We can help you to identify, prioritise and action pre-tender tasks, saving you precious time during the response window.