NHS Shared Business Services (SBS) has developed a framework agreement focusing on insourcing of clinical services, designed to offer a “compliant route” for NHS trusts to source and procure services at their own site, supporting the NHS in securing extra clinical capacity to meet increased demand and enabling trusts to retain capacity planning in-house.
Through the agreement, trusts can bring in third party suppliers to provide clinical diagnostic and treatment services through idle NHS equipment and premises. It covers all elective specialty services and is intended for use as a short to medium term solution.
Ian French, principal category manager for health at NHS SBS states that insourcing “can help in working towards attaining the 18-week referral to treatment target, enabling the NHS to utilise rooms that may otherwise be dormant, or to hold clinics out-of-hours to increase capacity and thus the volume of patients seen”. He added that this can help providers to “see a high volume of patients in a short amount of time”, with the agreement ensuring that the insourcing service procured is tailored to meet NHS trust needs.
The procurement framework will run until July 2027 with more details available here.
Also from NHS SBS
In other news from NHS SBS this year, HTN highlighted the awarding of a contract for a framework agreement around the “provision of digital health advisory and related goods and services for healthcare”. 40 suppliers were named on the agreement, which covers areas such as specialist clinical and healthcare digital consultancy and clinical and digital health delivery and augmentation.
Earlier in 2024, we reported how 23 suppliers were named on an NHS SBS framework agreement for audio visual solutions and integrated operating theatres. The framework aims to help connect operating theatres with multi-disciplinary teams for specialist collaboration across multiple sites as well as providing provision for patient check-in, patient entertainment and digital signage solutions.
Wider NHS news
Earlier this week, HTN explored the themes shared by NHS England around emergency preparedness, resilience and response.
We highlighted a pre-procurement notice from NHSE for an £18 million health and justice EPR, signalling the beginning of market engagement on an EPR system to capture health data and records across the health and justice area, covering prisons, detention centres, and more.
HTN reported on clinical guidance for automation and the functionality of patient portals as set out by NHSE.
And we looked into how AI is being used across four different NHS trusts in South Tyneside and Sunderland, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Warwickshire and Doncaster.
