NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) has outlined its intention to work with suppliers to deliver its Digital Diabetes Prevention Programme, which seeks to provide “a proven clinical intervention using digital technology” with trained lifestyle coaches enabling participants to track progress against type 2 diabetes.
The programme will offer support to participants over a nine month period, with a focus on “enabling patients to take control of their own health and wellbeing”, with lifestyle coaches helping to support and encourage “lasting lifestyle change”.
With a budget outlined of up to £3 million, the programme is expected to support up to 5000 participants per annum, with engagement sessions planned to take place in February.
NSS notes that in Scotland it’s estimated that up to a third of the adult population are living with non-diabetic hyperglycaemia or prediabetes, with the “vast majority being unaware of this”. They add that “between 5-10% of those with NDH will progress to T2D every year”.
The prior information notice aims to engage with interested suppliers prior to a procurement. To read the notice in full, please click here.
Procurements and funding from across the health sector
Back in December, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) awarded a £1.3 million grant to four South East London based organisations to work on a research project that aims to determine how well a digital weight management tool can help people with obesity in the area.
The Department of Health and Social Care also announced £126 million in funding to help support hospices in making improvements to IT systems and facilities, in what it has termed the “biggest investment into hospices in a generation”. The funding is part of the government’s Plan for Change, aiming to ensure access for citizens to “high-quality end of life care”, to deliver “improved standards of care”, and to develop a health service that is “fit for the future”. It also factors into the 10 Year Health Plan’s aims to shift healthcare from hospitals and into the community. According to the announcement, the investment will go toward the refurbishment of facilities, as well as improvements in buildings, equipment, accommodation, IT systems, and to “make it easier for GPs and hospitals to share vital data on patients”.
Norfolk and Waveney ICB awarded a two-year contract worth £250,000 for a social prescribing digital platform to tech supplier Pungo. The ICB aimed to realise improvements in care for the local community by using the digital platform to “support resilience and maturity of social prescribing offers”. Aligning with the shared care record, the digital platform hopes to facilitate “seamless referrals” to non-clinical provisions, serving as a case management system for non-clinical activities, and offering an overview of “input and output” across the region’s care sector.
Earlier in January, a framework with the value of up to £10 million, opened for a national agreement for the provision of data validation services, to enable NHS organisations to “access highly specialised support to enable the testing and validation of patient data, as part of the process of migrating from a legacy PAS to a modern EPR system”. The framework sets out to offer NHS organisations expert assistance, including in the validation of incomplete pathways and in understanding data quality issues which might affect migration to an EPR system, allowing them to offer assurance on the accuracy of patient data and “support the optimal use of the EPR from implementation”.
