Crisis Beds · UK public procurement notice

Regionally and nationally, increasing pressure is being placed on adult acute mental health wards. The increasing number of male and female hospital admissions to local services requires commissioning solutions in order to provide alternatives to admission. Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams (CRHTT) are tasked with providing crisis support and delivering intensive home treatment to support and where applicable treat, service users to remain in the community and avoid hospital admissions.

Often a gap still exists between the CRHTT support and acute admission. Some service users will require 24 hour support, ensuring a person’s safety but, not necessarily require health staff to provide this care. This support may be required intensively but over a short period in a service which is less institutional than a hospital setting.

Crisis houses are an approach to care that provides respite or sanctuary outside of hospital. They have been developed alongside CRHT and hospital based care. They have strong support from service user groups. A community-based crisis services will offer residential support and include:

• Services located within community settings. They provide residential services with staff onsite 24/7, and have a highly competent support staff involved in providing care. Night cover will have a minimum of 2 workers with at least 1 a waking night cover.
• These services provide a small number of beds aimed at short stays and are fully integrated with CRHT teams.

These models support individuals when they are reaching crisis and in most cases prevent admission into an inpatient setting. They can also prevent breakdown of existing placements/homes by allowing a short admission to assess and reformulate care and support plans to enable them to move back into their existing homes.

Engagement event

BCH have developed a draft specification and would like to invite organisations potentially capable of providing crisis beds to attend a market engagement event. This will allow testing of the viability of delivering the proposed service model and to allow providers to share their views on the specification.

The market testing event will be held on Monday 26th June 2023 10.30 – 12 noon via MS Teams. A calendar invite will be issued to interested parties along with the draft specification, and an agenda will be issued closer to the event.

If you are unable to attend but would like the opportunity to speak to us about the content of the specification, please do still contact us.

Timescales

Please register your attendance for the market testing event through the Bravo portal (www.nhssourcing.co.uk/web/login.html ↗) by the deadline of 5pm Thursday 22nd June 2023.

Organisations already registered on the system need not re-register.

A subsequent procurement process may take place in August 2023 with the expectation that services are mobilised and ready to start delivery in November 2023. If a competitive procurement is to take place BCH will issue a separate contract notice. These dates are approximate based on current knowledge and may be subject to change.

Any expenditure, work or effort undertaken by interest organisation prior to any subsequent procurement is a matter solely for their own commercial judgement. BCH reserve the right to withdraw from the process at any time or to not tender the service or to tender on a different basis. In such circumstances, and in any event, BCH shall not be liable for any costs or loss of expenses whatsoever incurred by any organisation, agent or subsidiary that may have contributed to any proposals submitted to this notice.

Inability in attend this market engagement event will not impact any organisation's ability to tender for this opportunity in the future.