Procurement description
The contract will initially be delivered for NHS-funded care in England and Wales for a period of 3 years, at an initial maximum total budget of up to £1,523,232 GBP including VAT (a total budget of up to £1,269,360 GBP excluding VAT). Bids exceeding this limit will be rejected. There is potential to extend the contract for up to two additional years at a potential value of £507,744 GBP per year including VAT, £423,120 GBP per year excluding VAT.
All pricing submissions must be in regard to this 'core' value, and not inclusive of any extension costs or aspirational intent costs, i.e. Please only submit a cost schedule up to the maximum core value of £1,523,232 GBP including VAT, £1,269,360 GBP excluding VAT.
The maximum budget ‘core’ value excludes the potential two year extension and aspirational intent as described in section 14.4 of Annex A - Service Specification.
Please note, there is no commitment by the Authority at this stage to include any aspirational intent measures. Taking the total of this aspirational intent into account, as well as the possibility that a contract extension may be offered for an additional two years, the potential ceiling value is £9,231,961 GBP including VAT.
There is also a potential that the contract price will be subject to discretionary inflationary uplift.
The role of a national clinical audit is to stimulate healthcare improvement through the provision of timely and high quality information on the organisation, delivery and outcomes of healthcare, together with tools and support to enable healthcare providers and other audiences to make best use of this information. Outcomes are benchmarked against national guidance and standards e.g. quality standards from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and those from other established professional and patient sources.
The overarching aim of this audit is to stimulate improvements in care that NHS Mental Health Trusts in England and Health Boards in Wales provide to people with psychosis by measuring and reporting variations in quality of care and patient outcomes. During this contract period, the successful tenderer will need to build on the achievements of the audit so far, and enhance the ability for the audit to be used for healthcare improvement. To do this, the supplier will need to engage with clinicians, patients and commissioners (both local and national) and regional networks.
Successful national audits are those where the individuals providing the data are also in a position to improve the system, and where there is a shared understanding of what good care looks like. Data is most useful locally for healthcare improvement when its provision to clinical teams is timely, the data is refreshed regularly, and appropriate tools, support and guidance accompany the data outputs. The intent is for all of these features to be implemented and improved during the period of this future contract.
The audit will continue to promote equitable, high-quality, evidence-based care for all NHS-funded patients receiving support from Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) services. There is no planned significant changes to the existing core project model, with an ongoing emphasis on strengthening quality, relevance, and programme resilience. The audit will prioritise the use of routinely collected data and explore supplementary, non-duplicative data sources, including data linkage, to enhance health outcomes information. There also needs to be a continued focus on improving Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED) coding guidance for EIP and data quality.
The anticipated outputs are:
1.Near real-time dynamic and interactive metric results
2.Publication of an annual state of the nation report
3.Infographic based on the annual state of the nation report
4.Quality improvement resources
5.The identification and notification of outliers
6.One-off organisational audit report
The programme must remain effective and responsive to changing delivery service models, including for example emerging neighbourhood-based integrated models, including the context of third-sector delivery.
The scope of this national clinical audit programme comprises a prospective audit of key measures on the processes and outcomes of care provided by Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) teams to people with psychosis in England and Wales.
As with all our contracts, HQIP prioritises the minimisation of local data entry/submission burden and the impact of data flows on patient privacy, and the maximisation of quality, timeliness and cost-efficiency of reporting of data. To avoid burden on the healthcare system, the audit will use electronic patient record data and/or routine data (e.g. hospital episode statistics (HES) and Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS)) whenever available, rather than collect bespoke data. Where data items are collected from providers/services, these must be directly aligned with the audit quality improvement intent in order to minimise collection burden.
Further details of the existing audit can be found at: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/improving-care/ccqi/national-clinical-audits/national-clinical-audit-of-psychosis