NHS Tenders and Contracts

NHS notices are published across many portals, including Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and individual trust and ICB e-tendering sites. Stotles pulls them into one search and tracks notices from pre-tender market engagement through to award, so you can see what a trust is planning before it goes out to the market.

NHS notices span clinical work such as diagnostics, elective care, pharmacy and pathology, alongside the non-clinical side of running a trust: estates and facilities management, IT and digital platforms, workforce and specialist recruitment, and patient transport. Buyers range from a single acute trust running one contract to arm's length bodies like NHS Business Services Authority procuring on behalf of the wider service.

There is no single NHS approved supplier list. Suppliers get in by winning a place on a national or regional framework agreement, or by winning an individual trust, integrated care board or arm's length body's own tender directly. Reading a buyer's own commercial strategy and forward plan before a tender opens is the way to see a re-tender coming rather than finding out once it is already live.

NHS notices most often carry 85100000 (Health services) and 85000000 (Health and social work services). Hospital-specific work carries 85111000 (Hospital services).

There is no single national NHS procurement directory. Each trust, integrated care board and arm's length body runs its own procurement team, published on its own website and named on its own tender documents. The buyer named on each notice shows who to approach, rather than starting from a switchboard number.

NHS trusts such as Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust and Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust buy software and digital platforms through the G-Cloud framework, awarding contracts for quality and compliance software and digital mental health services.

Clinical supplies, medicines and estates work each run through their own frameworks, so the route into an NHS contract depends on what the trust is buying.