£1 billion PCS tender issued

NHS England has issued a £1 billion tender for a single provider of primary care support services.

The tender, issued yesterday, indicates that the commissioning board is looking to hand over the services it is running to a provider willing to shake them up and drive down costs over the four years of the contract.

“The initial requirement is to take on the delivery of certain services currently provided by NHS England… and then drive through a transformation plan to enhance service quality and value for money,” it says.

Primary care support services encompass a wide range of ‘back office’ services for GPs, commissioners, and other primary practitioners, such as pharmacies and dental practices.

These include payment, finance and audit functions, HR and pension administration, support for administrative and clinical systems, patient registration, and the management of records, including their storage and transfer.

They also include support for primary care activities such as breast screening and cervical cancer screening, such as sending call and results letters.

NHS England inherited responsibility for many of these functions from primary care trusts, when they were abolished and replaced by clinical commissioning groups, as part of the Lansley re-organisation of the NHS.

The Health Service Journal reported in March that the commissioning board was looking to save £40m on an annual budget of around £100m by consolidating the services into 12 regional centres, amid concern from unions that this could lead to significant redundancies.

At the time, NHS England said it had been approached by Shared Services Connected, a joint venture between the Cabinet Office and Steria, to take over the services, and it was assessing this alongside other approaches.

The commissioning board now seems to have decided to push ahead with the outsourcing option. The tender says “various sites throughout England” will be affected, and that staff may need to be legally transferred to the new provider.

However, many PCS services are already provided by third parties, including NHS Shared Business Services, which says on its website that it is the “largest provider of primary care services to the NHS in England”.

Organisations wanting to express interest in the work must register with the eSourcing portal, and then complete pre-qualification questionnaires by 11 December.

The tender says NHS England is looking for three of four candidates to take forward to the next stage, and the final contract will be awarded on the basis of the “most economically advantageous tender”.  

Other parts of the UK – Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey – are also covered by the procurement, in that their governments and IT services can choose to use it if they want to.