25107 Early Intervention and Prevention Services

Cambridgeshire County Council are planning for the recommissioning of four services focused on early intervention and prevention:

• Information and advice service to older people
• Befriending service for older people
• Sensory services to people with sight loss
• Sensory services to people with hearing loss

We are conducting preliminary market engagement to gather insights from potential providers and better understand the current landscape from a provider's perspective. We intend to retender the above services at the same time in a single tender process, divided into lots.

Service Overview:

The Information and Advice Service for Older People supports independence at home and provides help with access to benefits and other services. The service is strengths-based, encouraging peer support, community connections, and helping individuals build resilience, independence, and coping skills. It is also place-based, with a requirement to tailor recommendations and signposting to the local reality in each locality, and is responsive to individual needs. We are open to consortium bids for this contract or a lead provider model where one organisation works collaboratively with others to ensure local knowledge and resources are optimised across all our communities.

The Befriending Service provides telephone or face-to-face contact for older people who would otherwise experience social isolation and who are not accessing local opportunities or venues at the time of referral. The service should seek to promote autonomy and independence where possible, but provides a lifeline for those who have struggled to build or maintain relationships in their community, sometimes due to limited mobility. We would welcome consortium bids for this contract or a lead provider model where one organisation works collaboratively with others to ensure local knowledge and resources are optimised across all our communities.

The Sensory Services ensure Information and Advice needed by people living with sensory loss (i.e. sight loss or hearing loss) is made available in an accessible format and provide expert advice on benefits and other services that may be needed, including British Sign Language and/or help with Assistive Technology. It is hoped that these services will be accessible to people who live in all corners of Cambridgeshire and to that end, there may be opportunities for lead providers (of each kind of sensory service) to collaborate with local partners in certain areas or to submit a consortium bid.