Market Engagement for Community Inclusion Service in Inner City and East Bristol Locality

Inner City and East (ICE) Bristol Locality Partnership (LP) - part of Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board (BNSSG ICB) - is considering an opportunity to provide a two-year contract (with the option to extend for one further year), to establish and run a new Community Inclusion Service. The service will support those people in the ICE Bristol locality, who are amongst the most marginalised to access and benefit from mainstream mental health and wellbeing services. The service will be a crucial component of a new Community Mental Health (CMH) Programme in the ICE Locality. The contract value would be estimated to be approximately £370k per annum, or £1.1m over the full three year period.

With this in mind, we are undertaking a market engagement exercise to help shape the final specification and to better understand potential interest in delivering this service, prior to formally offering the opportunity to the market.

We are looking for an organisation, partnership or alliance of providers, that can demonstrate:

• an ability to work with people from the communities described below
• a commitment to addressing health inequalities
• ability to deliver community mental health or wellbeing services
• a commitment to building a place-based approach to service delivery using the assets and actors within communities
• a commitment to co-production
• the capability to collaborate with mental health providers to support the wider transformation of services both in the Inner City and East locality and across the BNSSG ICB

The successful organisation, partnership or alliance of providers would need to deliver the full range of services outlined in the specification (once finalised) from 1st July 2023.

Based on health and population data the initial focus of this service will be on the following communities:

• African-Caribbean
• Somali
• South Asian
• Eastern European
• Refugees and Asylum Seekers
• LBGTQ+

It is not an exhaustive list; it should be read as a guide to where the initial focus of the service should be, not as an exclusion of other marginalised communities.

See Appendix C for more information.

The Community Inclusion Service will:

• support people from these communities to access, engage with and benefit from the full range of mental health services that may be available to them, as well as community-based wellbeing activities
• support people to address issues, such as debt, housing, and work
• ensure the person receives personalised care that is culturally appropriate throughout their engagement with services
• use a relational approach that will enable the person to build trust with the worker, with the service, and with wider mental health services

We anticipate the service will do this through the employment of Community Link Workers (provisional name). The Community Link Workers will act as 'key workers' who coordinate the care of the person and, where required, advocate on their behalf including as part of the multi-agency, multi-practitioner Integrated Personalised Care Teams (also known as Integrated Mental Health Teams). Broadly, we would expect these link workers will have a clear focus on a particular community (e.g., Somali) and a strong understanding of the communities they serve, acknowledging that people are never defined by any single category (for example, a person using the service may well be Eastern European and also identify as gay).

The full outline service description is provided as an attachment to this advert on the Contracts Finder Portal.

If you wish to express an interest (either in bidding for any future opportunity or in attending an engagement meeting), please do so by email to Mark Stanbrook, Lead Senior Procurement Manager at [email protected] (and cc'ing [email protected]) by no later than 5pm on the 23rd September 2022.