Briefing
New Community Services Briefing – An update as we enter the new year
Welcome to the third briefing about how we want to grow and improve local community services across County Durham and Darlington. The pre-existing contracts for these services have expired and a joint Prior Information Notice (PIN) was issued on behalf of Durham Dales Easington and Sedgefield, North Durham and Darlington Clinical Commissioning Groups last year. This informs potential providers about our intention to procure new community services and invites providers to bid to run those services. The bids have been examined by the evaluation team made up of subject experts and we are pleased to inform you that shortlisting has taken place and there are three successful bidders, all of whom have been notified and invited along to a dialogue session in January. We will be talking to potential providers about the new services and seeking their feedback on our proposed model.
We wanted to share with you where we are in our timeline.
We want to work with these potential providers to commission a shared vision of improving access, continuity and co-ordination of community-based health and care services of the highest quality which can best meet the needs of the communities across Durham and Darlington. These services need to be robust, safe and value for money.
We have a real opportunity during this commissioning process to identify priorities for service improvement whilst maintaining the benefits of the current service model from what we know about what’s working well and what could be improved. We are very much looking forward to coming up with a plan that will allow patients to move away from being passive recipients of their care, to being able to achieve outcomes that matter to them, allowing them to address lifestyle factors of ill health supporting them to self-manage.
We are excited to be able to improve the patient experience as there will be more services in primary and community care settings, meaning patients can be seen closer to their homes.
We will inform you of the outcome of the procurement in April this year.
This bulletin will be added to our CCG websites:
in the ‘ ABOUT US/ About our CCG’ section under ‘ New Community Services’
If you would like to get in touch and have any questions about the new community procurement, then please do so by e mailing us here :