NHS England has today (Thursday) announced the organisations that have been approved to join the new Commissioning Support Lead Provider Framework, following a rigorous procurement process.

The organisations from across the NHS and private sector have successfully met the tough quality and value for money tests to deliver the best support services to Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and other commissioners of health and social care services.

The framework has been developed with local clinical commissioners who asked for a simpler and less costly process for choosing the support they need. In February 2014, NHS England invited organisations to come forward who were capable of bringing together end to end support services, such as back office finance and HR, GP IT services, contracting, engagement and business intelligence. The Invitation to Tender stage concluded last month.

The organisations that have been successful include NHS Commissioning Support Units (CSUs) and their partners, as well as a number of independent sector consortia:

The organisations bring together a range of partners to deliver the very best services in areas like innovative contracting approaches (including outcome based commissioning); transformation change and service redesign for the Five-Year forward view (including embedding the NHS Change Model); supporting patient involvement and engagement and robust approaches to reactive communications; renegotiating contracts; and using innovative business intelligence tools and skills to drive improvement.

Bob Ricketts, Director of Commissioning Support Services said: “I’m delighted about the range of quality providers that have made it onto the framework. I genuinely believe that these organisations have brought together the best services in the market to offer commissioners everything they need to deliver the vision of the Five Year Forward View.

Local commissioners have been asking for a faster, simplified approach to choosing and changing their commissioning support provider. The framework will cut a typical procurement process to only three months and with the free procurement and legal support we are offering to CCGs and other commissioners, we hope to make the burden of re-procuring their commissioning support requirements as small as possible”.

Providers were finally selected after a two month ITT assessment by a panel of over thirty representatives from CCGs, NHS England’s area teams, NHS Improving Quality, NHS Right Care, and other subject matter experts.

NHS England is encouraging CCGs to use the framework to re-procure their current Service Level Agreements with CSUs, many of which run out in April 2016 and must be openly tendered before then. NHS England have put in place free procurement and legal support to reduce the burden on CCGs so that the process is as quick and simple as possible and they can get the best value for money from bidders using the volume based discounts on offer.

It is anticipated that between £3-5bn of services will be procured through the framework in light of the need for all current SLAs between CCGs and CSUs needing to be tendered openly to comply with EU law.