Tower Hamlets Primary Care Psychological Therapies Service (including IAPT) PRJ447

The Authority is intending to award a contract for primary care psychological support to adults, meeting the needs of the local population, offering a flexible model of delivery.

The new service is expected to increase the proportion of people with common mental health disorders who are identified, assessed and receive treatment in accordance with appropriate NICE guidance. It is expected that the service will work to improve the speed of access and response to patient need, increase the proportion of people with common mental health disorders covered by the service who make a clinically significant improvement or recovery, increase social participation and community integration of services users, and improve service user experience of services.

The new service will incorporate a range of primary care psychological therapy services for adults including:

• A single point of entry
• Assessment, including complex assessment
• An IAPT service including a step 3+ and counselling provision, delivering Five Year Forward View targets
• A non-IAPT pathway including bereavement counselling

The service will be provided for adults with specific pathways for priority groups.

The estimated annual contract value is £3,447,502. Total estimated value for five years is £17,237,510. The contract will be for a base period of 3 years with the option to extend for a further 2 years. It is anticipated that the new service will commence in October 2018.

To encourage innovation, Bidders are therefore, in addition to submitting a Standard Bid, permitted to submit a variant bid (or bids) in relation to certain defined elements of the Specification, explaining their proposal for meeting the relevant requirement of the specification in a different way to that which is indicated in their Standard Bid.

The services covered by the light touch regime are set out at Schedule 3 (Social and Other Specific Services) of PCR 2015. The Commissioner is not voluntarily following any other part of the Regulations. The procedure that the Commissioner is following is as set out in the Invitation to Tender. The Process will be similar to Open Procedure process under the Regulations but, for avoidance of doubt, the commissioner is not running the Process as though the Open Procedure under the Regulations applies and so reserves the right to depart from that procedure at any point. The procurement will be advertised via OJEU and Contract Finder.