UHB Emergency Paging Service Replacement

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest teaching hospital Trusts in England and the West Midlands, serving a regional, national and international population. It includes Birmingham Heartlands Hospital, Birmingham Chest Clinic, Good Hope Hospital, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Solihull Hospital and various Community Services. We also run a number of smaller satellite units, allowing people to be treated as close to home as possible. UHB is a Foundation Trust employing around 24,000 members of staff and we are committed to investing in their development and health and wellbeing. UHB treats over 2.2 million patients each year, and has 2,366 in-patient beds over 105 wards in addition to 115 children's beds and 145 day-case beds. The trust operates 7,127 outpatient and 304 community clinics per week.

UHB NHS Foundation Trust has a requirement to procure a Trust-wide Emergency Paging Solution which will improve patient safety, improve staff welfare, improve communications between individuals and teams, improve operational effectiveness, and improve accountability and governance.

Pagers & bleeps are used at UHB for both emergency and non-emergency communication. They have been the used for many years as the mainstay for requesting a bleep-holder's attention, but they now are regarded as inefficient and outdated technology. Key issues identified include no record of confirmation that bleeps are received, and communication "blackspots" within the Trust where messages are either received inconsistently or not received at all. The current solution relies on UHF transmitters across the hospital sites. Part of this solution is an app which enables them to receive pager messages. However, the app does not meet the requirements due to how messages are initiated by the user. It relies on a contact being already set up in the app. The infrastructure is legacy technology and is not 100% reliable.

Potential bidders are asked to note that the route to market has not yet been decided and therefore the procurement timetable has not been finalised. The Authority will make a final decision on the most appropriate route market following this engagement exercise. This may be a direct award via an existing public sector framework agreement or alternatively, the Authority may decide to run a competitive process via a mini-competition under a framework or an openly advertised procedure. If the latter, the publication of the ITT will include the publication of a Contract Notice, a Contracts Finder notice, and the ITT documents will be published on the Authority' Atamis e-tendering system.

Suppliers wishing to participate in this market engagement exercise and express an interest in this requirement should respond to the questionnaire via the online form on the Health Family Single eCommercial System Portal (Atamis) by 13:00 on Tuesday 1st August 2023.

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