Delivery of MenACWY vaccine to 19-25 year old students in London during September 2017

London Region is looking for any existing qualified providers to deliver MenACWY vaccine to 19-25 year old students during September 2017.

London’s community pharmacies are exempt from this procurement process since they will apply and be processed via SONAR platform as a Contract Variation to their Core Contract.

MenACWY vaccine was introduced in 2015 to respond to a rapid and accelerating increase in cases of invasive meningococcal group W (MenW) disease, which had been declared a national incident. The MenACWY conjugate vaccine provides direct protection to the vaccinated cohort and, by reducing MenW carriage, will also provide indirect protection to unvaccinated children and adults. This follows advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).

Meningococcal disease is a bacteria infection caused by Neisseria meningitides. There are 12 identified capsular groups and Men ACWY protects against 4 of the most common. Between 5-11% of adults and up to 25% of adolescents carry the bacteria and carriage rate is low in infants and young children. Transmission is by aerosol, droplets or direct contact with respiratory secretions of someone carrying the organism. It is not clear why disease develops in some people and not others. The latest annual trend data is for 2015/16 and this demonstrated in increase of 11% in Invasive Meningococcal Disease (IMD) from 724 cases in 2014/15 to 805. (Overall IMD rates are declining since 1999/2000 due to the successful Men C and Men B vaccination programmes in childhood).
Since 2009, Men W is on the rise and accounted for 25% of cases reported in 2015/16, increasing by 19% from 176 in 2014/15. Numbers of Men W cases were the highest seen since records started in the 1990s and the increase is attributed to the increase to of the hyper virulent Men W clonal complex 11 (cc11) which is not associated with travel and is seen predominately in adolescents, whom contributed 17% of the cases. Men W causes 4 deaths annually and in 2016, there was a death in a first year university student (‘fresher’) in North East London.

This commission is for September – October 2017 only. This contract period is an estimation as there is a stock of 15,000 additional vaccines ordered for this purpose and this AQP service will run until this central stock of vaccines has been exhausted.

Any Qualified Provider seeking authorisation to proceed should register an interest in this opportunity via the ProContract portal, complete the online questionnaire and submit this completed questionnaire before the stated submission deadline of 17.00 on Friday 1 September 2017.

Activity will be reimbursed at the standard London region price of £9.80 per vaccination for MenACWY 19-25. No further payment is provided as part of this service delivery.

This procurement is being conducted as an AQP process for a short-term time limited contract under the NHS Standard Contract 2017/18 terms and conditions. The services to which this procurement relate fall under Schedule 3 of the Public Contracts Regulations (PCR) 2015 and, as such, NHS England do not intend to hold themselves bound to any of the PCR regulations save those applicable to services procured under the “Light Touch Regime”.