Sector: Community health
Client: Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust (CLCH)
Services provided: Bid preparation, bid writing support
Benefits delivered
HealthcareBids helped CLCH to respond to an invitation to tender (ITT) to provide adult community services within West Hertfordshire. Working closely with the Trust’s operational and clinical teams, we helped to develop a winning bid by ‘showcasing’ CLCH’s strong track record in delivering transformation and demonstrating the Trust’s ability to respond effectively to the commissioner’s requirements.
Project summary
A key goal for West Hertfordshire CCG was to integrate the provision of physical and mental healthcare and social and voluntary support. By bringing services and providers closer together, the CCG wanted to ensure that patients could benefit from more co-ordinated care.
CLCH already provided both sexual health and respiratory services within West Hertfordshire and had significant expertise in delivering community services across eleven London Boroughs. However, this was a new geography for the Trust in which it had to deliver a comprehensive range of adult community services.
Bid Preparation and Writing
CLCH asked HealthcareBids to help write the tender responses.
HealthcareBids worked with the Divisional Director of Operations, the Head of Business Development and all supporting clinical teams to explore and articulate CLCH’s extensive experience and expertise in transforming adult community services.
The tender process was extremely rigorous and required responses to be written on a wide range of searching questions, including topics such as;
- Proposed bed-based model for community hospitals
- A strategy to reduce avoidable hospital admissions
- Improving patient outcomes through system integration
- Promoting personal health budgets
- Innovative practices to deliver reductions in average lengths of stay in hospitals
In addition, as part of the tender, the commissioners posed several complex patient scenarios which described the history and detailed health needs of hypothetical patients. Bidders were required to explain precisely how they would manage and care for the patients in each scenario.
To develop bid responses we held workshops to engage the wider team, worked onsite with clinicians and led multiple discussions to explore the detail for each topic.
We were delighted when, in January 2019, CLCH was announced as the successful bidder.