Veterans Mental Health Pilot Services - NHS England

NHS England commissions services for the armed forces and their families and in some circumstances services for veterans. These include prosthetics and mental health services.

In the Spring 2015 Budget, the Chancellor made available to the NHS in England additional monies for veterans mental health services to support the most vulnerable in the community.

The Forces in Mind Trust has recently undertaken research into veterans’ health needs; this has identified a number of gaps in service. NHS England is seeking Bidders to develop and pilot mental health services to address these identified gaps.

These pilot service contracts are split into 3 Lots as follows:

Lot 1 - Joint Substance Misuse and Mental Health Pilot for Veterans Lot 2 - Severe PTSD Outpatient Service Pilot Lot 3 - Overcoming Barriers to Mental Health Service Access for Early Service Leavers

NHS England (the Contracting Authority) expects each Contract to start before 31st October 2015 and they will run until 31st March 2016.

Each Contract/Lot will have a maximum permissible contract value of £400,000 (Ex VAT).

Bidders will not be limited in how many Lots they are able to bid for and the Contracting Authority may award multiple Lots to one Bidder (where Bidders express an interest in being awarded multiple Lots).

In light of the short term nature of the pilot contracts, the challenging timescales for mobilisation and service delivery and given the nature of the services themselves, the Contracting Authority has stipulated the following mandatory criteria for this procurement:

1) Voluntary Sector involvement - It is a mandatory requirement for Bidders to include a form of voluntary sector involvement in their service delivery proposals (see Section A questions for further details). The Authority will accept various forms of relationships including, but not limited to, Bidders who propose to subcontract services to, form a partnership with, or enter into a joint venture with, one or more charity organisations in the support of the delivery of the Services.

2) Mental Health service providers – It is a mandatory requirement that a current provider of NHS-commissioned Mental Health services is involved in the service delivery alongside the successful provider in some capacity (i.e. as the Lead Bidder or a significant subcontractor) due to the knowledge, experience and other value that such providers would bring to these challenging, short-term pilot contracts.

The procurement process will adopt the “Open Procedure” as a template in that no formal Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) process will be followed. The ITT will be split into stages and the ITT pack contains Eligibility questions which Bidders must pass in order for their ITT bids to be progressed to the evaluation stage. See the ITT documentation for further details.

Full advertisement wording is outlined on the attachment to this notice.