Department of Health & NHS Direct

Delivering a solution to meet volatile and large scale demand

The H1N1 outbreak – ‘Swine flu’ – exercised for real the preparations that the DH and NHS had made for pandemics. Such events place rare challenges on organisations – demand for service that has no recent precedents, is large scale, volatile and hard to forecast. DH put in place mechanisms to enable information and treatment to be provided remotely without patients visiting their local General Practitioner. A key mechanism was a telephone service to avoid infected people going to GP surgeries. This enabled citizens to obtain information and, if required, access to an appropriate treatment, and controlled the viral attack rate. This call centre-based service face major challenges – obtaining and mobilising suitable resource to provide service, for example aligning capacity to demand as waves of the epidemic passed through the UK population. The expedient solution put in place fulfilled its purpose well, but at a high cost per call. The DH and NHSD wanted to procure a longer term solution for similar health events, that provided guaranteed supply at reasonable costs.

David was appointed to advise the solution procurement and run a competitive dialogue procedure. David tailored a commercial and operating model he had used for analogous private sector requirements to those of the DH. Through a series of workshops, David’s team developed consensus around the best model to adopt, and prepared the appropriate procurement documentation. It engaged with suppliers in three steps – PQQ to establish qualified bidders, phase one competitive dialogue to assess qualified bidders’ ability to respond to the challenges face and a final phase to close on an agreed contract prior to final ITT. This work put in place a cost effective solution with guaranteed supply to enable the DH to respond to future threats