Age Well - Population Health Management for Essex

This is a voluntary ex ante transparency notice and is intended to provide notice of the Authority's intention to award a contract to deliver a Age Well Population Health Management service covering the population of Mid & South Essex, for a period of 9 months, from 4th April 2022. The aggregate contract value is forecasted at £800,000.00 over the 9 month term.

This notice is made by the Contracting Authorities; NHS Castle Point and Rochford Clinical Commissioning Group, NHS Southend Clinical Commissioning Group, NHS Basildon & Brentwood Clinical Commissioning Group, NHS Mid Essex Clinical Commissioning Group, NHS Thurrock Clinical Commissioning Group, (hereinafter referred to as “the Authority”) in compliance with their local standing financial instructions (SFIs).

The Authority will observe a 10-day standstill from the date of publication of this VEAT, during which the CCGs will not enter into any contractual arrangement.

The Service:

Newton Europe have been delivering the wider Connect Programme in Essex to transform care for older adults. The Connect Programme has successfully brought partners together in Mid and South Essex over the last year to transform outcomes for older people, with impacts across the non-elective pathway and into social care. Through the Connect Programme, stakeholders have identified further opportunities to improve system and patient outcomes and reduce health inequalities through a shift to Place and Neighbourhood led delivery, harnessing Population Health approaches.

This is the continuation of work based on outputs of core findings with a provider who was previously awarded a contract via a compliant framework and the impact of COVID has meant that there has been no capacity available (mainly due to redeployment of key staff) to undertake a more involved procurement process.

The Commissioners believe that working directly with Newton Europe is the best option to successfully undertake this work and maximise value for money as:

Working collaboratively with the provider will allow Commissioners to mobilise at pace, such that implementation can enable us to support necessary system pressure reduction in time for next winter. Additionally, each month of delay will cost £0.9m - £1.7m in missed benefits.

The need for this Diagnostic phase was realised through delivery of the Connect programme and complements the work delivered to date. The preferred supplier have worked successfully with the system over the last year to deliver the Connect Programme – they understands the local context and have significant knowledge of the locality and the patient cohorts. With consistent context and stakeholders, onboarding of a different partner would further significantly delay activity, and would require extra resource (and cost) from the system to support, whereas Newton Europe will be able to deliver impact from the beginning of the engagement.

This is the continuation of work with a provider who was previously awarded a contract via a compliant framework and the impact of COVID has meant that there has been no capacity available to undertake a more involved procurement process, any delay will lead to missed benefits.

The non-recurrent programme of diagnostic work will be delivered in a period of 90-100 days throughout quarters 1-3 of 2022/23. The service period shall therefore be 9 months.