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23.12.15

NHS England to probe £800m UnitingCare deal collapse

NHS England will commission an investigation into the circumstances leading up to the collapse of the £800m outsourcing deal to UnitingCare, an NHS-owned partnership.

Lord Prior of Brampton, minister for NHS Productivity and former CQC chair, said this week that the organisation will explore the issues behind the contract between Cambridgeshire & Peterborough CCG (CPCCG) and UnitingCare Partnership, created to deliver older people’s urgent care and adult community services.

“This will include the role of the Strategic Projects Team,” he said. “NHS England is also considering how similar contracts will be managed and assured in the future.”

He was answering a question from shadow health spokesperson, Lord Hunt, who asked how the government would hold the NHS Strategic Projects Team to account “for the advice it gave to the CPCCG, and to the NHS Commissioning Board, on the contract for older people’s services” in the region.

Lord Hunt also asked whether the government intended to establish an independent external assessment of the reasons behind the contract’s failure, and what plans they have for a “moratorium on further large-scale procurements until lessons from that contract have been learnt”.

According to the BBC, Lord Hunt said he was very concerned about the impact the “extraordinary” collapse was having on the region’s patients.

He told the BBC: “I’m going to be pressing NHS England to make sure the review is made public. People locally have every right to know what went wrong, who is responsible, and what is going to happen.”

The chief clinical officer at CPCCG was quoted as saying the organisation would work closely with NHS England on any review they commission.

The five-year outsourcing contract crumbed earlier in December just after eight months when UnitingCare Partnership said the deal was no longer financially sustainable.

An NHS consortium of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS FT with Cambridgeshire University Hospitals NHS FT, UnitingCare was named the preferred bidder in October 2014 to improve the region’s services for the elderly. It began operating these services in April.

The £800m deal was delivered with support from the Strategic Projects Team and was perceived as a key milestone in the CCG’s Older People’s Programme to improve healthcare in an area with increasingly high demand.

At the time, it also served to calm fears that the bidding process could lead to the single largest privatisation of NHS services – ultimately representing an early and landmark example of outcome-based contracting. The parties had hoped the deal’s long-term nature would give UnitingCare time to invest in and transform services.

When the contract fell apart, a spokesperson for the Strategic Projects Team, which is hosted by Greater East Midlands CSU, told NHE: “The Strategic Projects Team were amongst those appointed by CPCCG to provide support over an 18-month period to the management of an Integrated Older People’s Pathway and Adult Community Services delivery model and procurement. The process was the subject of detailed internal and external scrutiny and approval stages throughout. Our successful association was completed in February this year.

“As the NHS England Five Year Forward View recognises, and as the CCG confirmed, we are clear that the model of integrated service delivery care for older people, and those with long-term conditions, brings benefits to patients and the wider health and care system.”

Comments

Paatrick Newman   07/01/2016 at 10:33

Does the NHS really need the full panoply of a complex competitive tendering process in order "to invest in and transform services." I would argue that the formal separation of client and contractor under quasi commercial terms and conditions make the transformation of systems and services more problematic, not less.

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