Health services

Description

NHS Luton Clinical Commissioning Group and NHS Bedfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group sought to jointly commission an Integrated Urgent Care (111 & Out of Hours) Service across Luton and Bedfordshire via a ‘Prime Provider’ approach. Central to this will be a professional Clinical Advice Service offering patients who require access to a wide range of clinicians, both experienced generalists, and specialists. It is essential that these clinicians are supported by the availability of clinical records such as Summary Care Record (SCR) and Enhanced Summary Care Record (ESCR) as well as Electronic Prescribing and other locally available systems. The offer for the public will be a single entry point - NHS 111 - to fully integrate urgent care services in which organisations collaborate to deliver high quality, clinical assessment, advice and treatment and to shared standards and processes with clear accountability and leadership. Therefore the Integrated Urgent Care (111 & Out of Hours) Service should allow movement of patients seamlessly from one element of the system to the other, streamlining the experience for patients, reducing unnecessary waiting and inefficiency. The Integrated Urgent Care (111 & Out of Hours) Service should not be limited to treating patients, but must also be committed to empowering the population to self-care where appropriate with a focus on education and lifestyle modification. The new provider will need to plan for online and digital provision in the future in order to make it easier for the public to access urgent health advice and care. This will increasingly be in a way that offers a personalised and convenient service that is responsive to people’s health care needs when: – they need medical help fast, but it is not a 999 emergency, – they do not know who to contact for medical help, – the thing they need to go to A&E or another NHSE urgent care service, – they need to make an appointment with an urgent care service, – they require health information or reassurance about how to care for themselves or what to do next. The contract period is for 60 months with an option to extend the contract for an additional 24 months, valued at £6.5m per annum. The total contract value is 45 500 000,00 GBP if an option to extend the contract for a further 24 months is utilised.