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Contract Award

General Information
Country:   United Kingdom
City/Locality:   LONDON
Notice/Contract Number:   eu:255838-2009
Publication Date:   Sep 16, 2009
Buyer:   DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
Original Language:   English

Contact Information
Address:   DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
United Kingdom
Web Site:   www.dh.gov.uk

Goods, Works and Services

 

Summary

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Notice Type: 2280 - Contract award
Regulation of Procurement: European Communities, with participation by GPA countries
EU Official Journal Publication: 178/2009, #255838-2009
Referenced Document Number: 212432-2008
Contract Nature: Service contract
Procedure Type: Contract awards
Type of Bid Required: Not applicable
Awarding Criteria: The most economic tender
Successful Bidder: NAME AND ADDRESS OF ECONOMIC OPERATOR TO WHOM THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN
AWARDED: Northgate Information Solutions UK Limited, Peoplebuilding 2,
Peoplebuilding Estate, Marylands Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, UK-Hertfordshire
HP2 4NW. E-mail: nick.o'brien@northgate-is.com.
Northgate Information Solutions UK Limited, Peoplebuilding 2,
Peoplebuilding Estate, Marylands Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, UK-Hertfordshire
HP2 4NW. E-mail: nick.o'brien@northgate-is.com.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Registered Charity in
England no. RC000330) whose known office is at Keppel Street, WC1E 7HT
London. E-mail: Penny.Ireland@lshtm.ac.uk.

Original Text

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CONTRACT AWARD NOTICE
Services
SECTION I: CONTRACTING AUTHORITY
I.1) NAME, ADDRESSES AND CONTACT POINT(S): Department of Health, New
Kings Beam House, 22 Upper Ground, Attn: David Nuttall, UK-London SE1 9BW.
Tel. +44 2076334010. E-mail: david.nuttall@dh.gsi.gov.uk.
Internet address(es):
General address of the contracting authority: www.dh.gov.uk.
Address of the buyer profile: https://www.showa.dh.gov.uk/OA_HTML/
DHSupplierRegistration.jsp.
I.2) TYPE OF THE CONTRACTING AUTHORITY AND MAIN ACTIVITY OR ACTIVITIES:
Ministry or any other national or federal authority, including their
regional or local sub-divisions.
Health.
The contracting authority is purchasing on behalf of other contracting
authorities: no.
SECTION II: OBJECT OF THE CONTRACT
II.1) DESCRIPTION
II.1.1) Title attributed to the contract by the contracting authority:
Patient Reported Outcome Measures.
II.1.2) Type of contract and location of works, place of delivery or of
performance: Services.
Service category: No 10.
NUTS code UK.
II.1.4) Short description of the contract or purchase(s): 1. Introduction
Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are a means of collecting
information on the clinical quality of care delivered to NHS patients as
perceived by the patients themselves. The collection of these data will
fill a gap in the set of information available on the care delivered to
NHS-funded patients and would complement existing information. The
Department of Health (DH) is seeking to procure services to administer
PROMs, to collate the resulting data and to analyse and report the results
to a range of stakeholders.
The Memorandum of Information (MOI) which can be found within the
eTendering Portal provides further details of the services that the DH
seeks to procure.
2. Strategic context and policy issues The improvement of clinical quality
and outcomes for patients is at the heart of recent NHS system reforms.
For example, the Patient Choice reforms envisage patients making informed
decisions over their healthcare on the basis of quality information. Yet
relatively little of the clinical outcomes of NHS services is currently
known beyond information about adverse events (e.g. mortality,
readmissions) and information collected through clinical audit.
Data collected routinely by way of PROMs would fill this gap. A Hip
replacement questionnaire, for example,compares patients’ own assessments
of their mobility and pain before and after a hip operation, creating a
measure of clinical success. The Our NHS Our Future NHS Next Stage Review:
Interim report, published last.
October indicated that patient-reported information would become an
important component of efforts to measure and improve clinical quality:
“Establishing a clear framework and standard ways to measure results will
allow us to demonstrate the high quality of what we do, and identify what
is needed to sustain and improve that high quality. Any framework will
need to be comprehensive, rooted firmly in the recurring questions about
their care that people tell us are at the forefront of their minds, but
also scientifically valid and clinically relevant. It could be useful to
build on recent advances in measuring outcomes as assessed by patients
themselves, and make these patient reported outcome measures a stronger
part of our approach to clinical quality.” (Our NHS Our Future NHS Next
Stage Review: Interim report. October 2007. Department of Health, p.41).
This was confirmed again in High Quality Care for All, the Next Stage
Review Final Report which was published at the end of June.
There are a range of potential applications to which PROMs data collected
routinely from patients undergoing elective interventions can be put:
— to assess the relative clinical quality of providers of elective
procedures, for clinicians and managers and commissioners benchmarking
their own performance, for regulators, clinical audit and for patients and
GPs exercising choice,
— to research what works. Efficacy and cost-effectiveness of different
technical approaches to care can be evaluated using PROMs in association
with other measures that assess what would have happened to patients in
the absence of treatment or with alternative treatment,
— to assess the appropriateness of referrals to secondary care. PROMs data
used to establish whether referrals for elective procedures are
appropriate by examining variation in baseline PROMs scores across the
country and comparing against benchmarks. Furthermore, the Next Stage
Review Final Report indicated the intention to link payments to PROMs
data: “First, we will make payments to hospitals conditional on the
quality of care given to patients as well as the volume. A range of
quality measures covering safety (including cleanliness and infection
rates), clinical outcomes, patient experience and patient’s views about
the success of their treatment (known as patient reported outcome measures
or PROMs) will be used.” Recently reported research commissioned by the DH
from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has
piloted candidate measures for a small number of elective procedures with
2 400 patients at 24 sites, and demonstrated the feasibility of routine
outcomes measurement. On the back of the positive pilot results, routine
collection of PROMs for four high volume elective procedures was announced
in the 2008/9 NHS Operating Framework. The Standard NHS Acute Services
Contract launched alongside the Operating Framework mandates from April
2009 the collection of PROMs data from NHS patients undergoing Hip and
Knee replacements, Groin Hernia and Varicose Vein surgeries.
3. PROMs For the purpose of this procurement process, the “Patient
Reported Outcome Measures” or “PROMs” refers to self-completed
questionnaires administered to patients to assess their self-reported
health status before and after elective healthcare interventions funded by
the NHS. These PROMs will comprise a number of distinct elements,
including:
— questions, which seek to capture patientidentifying information,
— a generic (common across procedures) measure of self-reported health
status, and/or
— a procedure-specific measure of self-reported health status, and
— additional questions about the patient’s own health and well-being such
as whether they have co-morbidities. Collection of health status
information from patients before and after an intervention provides an
indication of the quality of care delivered to NHS patients. Changes in
health status as measured by PROMs, controlling for variation in patient
characteristics,are attributed to the healthcare delivered to the patient
by the healthcare provider and wider healthcare system.
These health outcomes data can be used in a variety of ways to assess the
quality of care delivered to NHS patients by providers. PROMs
questionnaire and administration methodology will be based on the LSHTM
research. The research evidence can be viewed on the LSHTM website.
Content and broad design of the PROMs questionnaires to be used for each
of the four elective procedures will remain the responsibility of the DH
(section 5.1, of the MOI, refers). Administration and return of the
pre-operative PROMs questionnaires will remain the responsibility of
providers of the relevant interventions to NHS patients (section 5.1, of
the MOI refers).
4. Scope definition Volumes In principle, the scope of the PROMs data
collection is all patients undergoing elective Unilateral Hip and Knee
replacements, all Groin Hernia surgeries and all Varicose Vein surgeries.
This approach, rather than a sampling approach, is required to ensure
sufficient volumes are captured for each provider to offer an adequate
degree of discrimination between units of interest. The total volume of
patients undergoing one of these four relevant elective procedures is
estimated to be 250 000 over the period of the contracts on offer. Table
4.1 of the MOI, presents the numbers of procedures carried out in the NHS
in 2006/7, the latest year for which complete data are available. During
the contract period, 2008/09 to 2011/12, there is expected to be some
growth in numbers, although the precise volumes by procedure difficult to
estimate with precision as funding priorities and medical preferences over
procedures will change over time. In practice, the number of patients
returning completed pairs of pre- and post-operative PROMs may be less
than the total volume of procedures undertaken. Some patients will decline
to participate and some proportion of those completing pre-operative PROMs
will fail to return post-operative PROMs. In addition, some proportion of
patients undergoing eligible procedures may not be eligible to participate
for a range of reasons, including illiteracy. Key parameters from the
pilot research are presented in table 4.2 of the MOI.
5. Overview of the PROMs contractual model. The PROMs contract comprises 3
separate lots (annex B refers) delivering a range of functions. These lots
will each interact with the NHS Information Centre (IC) to facilitate the
collection,processing and analysis of PROMs data.
II.1.5) Common procurement vocabulary (CPV): 79310000, 72316000,
72300000, 72310000, 72311100, 72311200, 72312000, 72312100, 72313000,
72314000, 73000000, 73110000, 79311300, 79320000, 79311200, 79330000.
II.1.6) Contract covered by the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA):
Yes.
SECTION IV: PROCEDURE
IV.1) TYPE OF PROCEDURE
IV.1.1) Type of procedure: Restricted.
IV.2) AWARD CRITERIA
IV.2.1) Award criteria: The most economically advantageous tender in
terms of
1. Optimum combination of fitness for purpose and whole life costing that
meet the requirements. Weighting: 90.
2. Interviews. Weighting: 10.
IV.2.2) An electronic auction was used: No.
IV.3) ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION
IV.3.2) Previous publication(s) concerning the same contract: Contract
notice
Notice number in OJ: 2008/S 157-212432 of 14.8.2008.
SECTION V: AWARD OF CONTRACT
CONTRACT NO: 1
TITLE: Lot 1.
V.1) DATE OF CONTRACT AWARD: 17.2.2009.
V.3) NAME AND ADDRESS OF ECONOMIC OPERATOR TO WHOM THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN
AWARDED: Northgate Information Solutions UK Limited, Peoplebuilding 2,
Peoplebuilding Estate, Marylands Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, UK-Hertfordshire
HP2 4NW. E-mail: nick.o'brien@northgate-is.com.
V.5) THE CONTRACT IS LIKELY TO BE SUB-CONTRACTED: Yes. Value or
proportion of the contract likely to be sub-contracted to third parties:
Not known.
CONTRACT NO: 2
TITLE: Lot 2.
V.1) DATE OF CONTRACT AWARD: 23.3.2009.
V.3) NAME AND ADDRESS OF ECONOMIC OPERATOR TO WHOM THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN
AWARDED: Northgate Information Solutions UK Limited, Peoplebuilding 2,
Peoplebuilding Estate, Marylands Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, UK-Hertfordshire
HP2 4NW. E-mail: nick.o'brien@northgate-is.com.
V.5) THE CONTRACT IS LIKELY TO BE SUB-CONTRACTED: Yes. Value or
proportion of the contract likely to be sub-contracted to third parties:
Not known.
CONTRACT NO: 3
TITLE: Lot 3.
V.1) DATE OF CONTRACT AWARD: 23.3.2009.
V.3) NAME AND ADDRESS OF ECONOMIC OPERATOR TO WHOM THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN
AWARDED: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Registered
Charity in England no. RC000330) whose known office is at Keppel Street,
WC1E 7HT London. E-mail: Penny.Ireland@lshtm.ac.uk.
V.5) THE CONTRACT IS LIKELY TO BE SUB-CONTRACTED: Yes. Value or
proportion of the contract likely to be sub-contracted to third parties:
Not known.
SECTION VI: COMPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
VI.1) CONTRACT RELATED TO A PROJECT AND/OR PROGRAMME FINANCED BY
COMMUNITY FUNDS: No.
VI.2) ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: All tenders were evaluated in accordance
with the following:
Most economically advantageous tender being the optimum combination of
fitness for purpose and whole-life cost that meet the requirements.
Ability to meet the information governance and technical requirements.
Providers failing to meet the stated Information Governance requirements
were excluded.
Experience at delivering complex survey and informatics services to the
NHS.
The scores were weighted 90 % to the written submissions (including any
amendments based on the return of clarification questions) and 10 % to the
assessment of the Bidder interviews.
VI.3) PROCEDURES FOR APPEAL:
VI.3.2) Lodging of appeals: Precise information on deadline(s) for
lodging appeals: Precise information on deadline(s) for lodging appeals:
If an appeal regarding the award of a contract has not been successfully
resolved the Public Contracts Regulations 2006 (SI 2006 No 5) provide for
aggrieved parties who have been harmed or are at risk of harm by a breach
of the rules to take action in the High Court (England, Wales and Northern
Ireland). Any such action must be brought promptly (generally within 3
months). Where a contract has not been entered into the Court may order
the setting aside of the award decision or order the authority to amend
any document and may award damages. If the contract has been entered into
the Court may only award damages.
VI.4) DATE OF DISPATCH OF THIS NOTICE: 11.9.2009.
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