Ambulance Services Tenders and Contracts

Ambulance services tenders cover emergency ambulance response, private ambulance providers filling blue light capacity for an NHS trust, non-emergency and high dependency patient transport, critical care transport between hospitals, and air ambulance provision.

Stotles brings together ambulance services tenders and contracts from 100+ portals into one search, so you do not have to check each portal separately, and you can set alerts for new opportunities across the UK and Ireland.

If you want to search the government portals directly, Find a Tender carries higher-value contracts across the UK and Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland's eTenders covers Irish public bodies, and many councils, NHS bodies and housing associations publish on their own e-tendering portals such as ProContract. NHS bodies publish ambulance contracts on the Department of Health and Social Care's Atamis portal as well as Find a Tender, and many awards use the Provider Selection Regime.

Ambulance tenders are scored on clinical quality and governance, crew skills, vehicle standards, response times and price. Trusts often bring in private crews through frameworks, so a framework place is usually the way in.

Providers of ambulance and patient transport services in England must be registered with the Care Quality Commission, and paramedics must be registered with the Health and Care Professions Council. Tenders usually set minimum insurance cover, check financial standing and ask for evidence of similar contracts at selection stage. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can be excluded for certain criminal convictions, insolvency or failure to pay tax.

Many recent awards use the Provider Selection Regime's Direct Award Process A, letting an NHS trust award or extend a contract with its existing or a named provider without a full competition. Others run as open frameworks or dynamic purchasing systems, particularly where a trust wants a pool of private ambulance operators on call for surge capacity.

Yes. NHS ambulance trusts regularly bring in private ambulance operators to cover demand during winter pressures, industrial action or staff shortages, usually through a framework or dynamic purchasing system rather than a one-off tender. Several of these contracts run for multiple years with private operators providing double-crewed ambulances alongside NHS crews.

NHS ambulance trusts are regular buyers, alongside acute hospital trusts, integrated care boards and NHS England commissioning specialist and patient transport. The Health Service Executive in Ireland and the governments of Jersey and Guernsey run their own emergency and air ambulance procurements outside the NHS structure.

Read ambulance trust winter and surge plans, integrated care board commissioning intentions and Provider Selection Regime notices, which show ambulance services work coming due ahead of a notice. On Stotles you can track those signals and the commissioners behind them, then follow a notice from pre-tender through to award.

The core code is 85143000, Ambulance services, which appears on the majority of emergency and private ambulance contracts. Air ambulance and fixed wing medical transfer work is more often coded under 60443000, Air-rescue services, alongside the aviation codes for aircraft hire.