Tender Alerts: Staffordshire’s £70m contract, Yorkshire and The Humber test

October 3, 2017 | by

Susanne Woodman, our Eye on Tenders, alerts us to two tenders, the first which will definitely pique our UK Readers’ attention with its size and duration. The second is for a proposal using TECS and telemedicine as an alternative to emergency services.

  • Staffordshire: This is a huge seven-year contract to create the Support For Independent Living In Staffordshire (SILIS) Service to enable older and disabled adults to age in place in their current homes. “A key aim of the Service is to help Individuals to make changes to their home environment that will prevent the need for more costly interventions, such as admission to hospital or residential care, following life crises.” The Service will improve upon existing services in Assistive Technology (AT) including referral to telecare providers.

There are six borough and district councils involved, with the potential for use by nine more. The contract is valued at £70 million to start April 2018 with renewal points, ending in March 2025. Deadline is Wednesday 1 November at noon. Much more information (you’ll need it) on TED EU-Tenders Electronic Daily. 

  • NHS Greater Huddersfield & North Kirklees CCG: This tender is for the provision of a technology-assisted, rapid access service offering an alternative to hospital-based A&E services. Market test site is in Kirklees for residents of a care home. Requirements are:
    • A 24/7 clinical teleconsultation service delivered via secure video link into residential/ nursing homes, that is utilized instead of patients having to be taken to the local A&E department.
    • A service that provides clinical consultation not a logarithm based approach like 111.
    • A fully managed technical service utilizing bespoke laptops with HD cameras and with 4G SIM or broadband.

The CCG may also commission an accountable care organization (ACO) for this care in future, to which this contract would transfer. Deadline is 5pm on Friday 20 October to brenda.powell@greaterhuddersfieldccg.nhs.uk. More information on Gov.UK.

2020Health evaluation of the Yorkshire ‘Telehealth Hub’ project (UK)

February 22, 2013 | by | 1 Comment

This important report was published last Friday. Like this editor, readers will surely thank the authors for making such a disparate mixture of elements readable and for picking their way through the implications for the 3ML campaign as well as the many clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which will take over the reins (or should that be pick up the pieces?) of the NHS across England and Wales in April.

I’m not going to attempt to summarise the report. The four-page Executive Summary contains three tables of essential findings and is the place to start. Despite, or perhaps because of, the general failure of the Telehealth Hub to achieve wider adoption locally, some significant lessons have been learned. TTA readers will, no doubt, comment on those lessons as they see them. Perhaps we should regard the work done by the Hub as a precursor to that which will be done by the 3ML Pathfinder sites. Let’s hope that they are studying this report closely and take note of this key comment by one of the Hub partners:

“When I look at the aims expressed, what strikes me is the ‘tele’ not the condition. We would write these aims differently now – whether because of learning or the fact that the environment changes. The risk now is that local CCGs only think in terms of local pathways and not the wider patient needs.”

The 2020Health evaluation of the Yorkshire ‘Telehealth Hub’ project can be downloaded from the 2020health press release Telehealth does produce savings.

Oh, and for any non-UK readers who may be confused by ‘Yorkshire’ in the title, the area covered by the Hub does not include North Yorkshire and York (NYY) which has famously failed to scale up its telehealth project also, but at more than three times the cost.