Adult Bereavement Counselling Service

City and Hackney Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) intends to directly award a contract for adult bereavement counselling services to St Joseph's Hospice. The service is for a dedicated bereavement counselling service in City and Hackney area to improve the mental wellbeing of bereaved family members, carers, relatives and friends. This will enable clients to:

The service must be culturally appropriate and accessible given the diversity of the population. The service must provide 12 counselling sessions at the outset of counselling with the possibility of extending for a further 6 sessions if there is a need. These can be provided in-person, by telephone or virtually.

The service must provide support groups post counselling for social interaction and work in partnership with a range of other services across the borough who provide other related services. These include GPs, Mental health services (IAPT), MIND, CRUSE, Compassionate Friends, Homerton Bereavement Service, Off Centre (12-25 year olds), Jewish Bereavement.

The service must provide signposting to a wide range of other services including potential step down options for low intensity need clients when they have finished their counselling and to crisis services for clients who need more urgent services.

The service must provide support for clients in groups as needed and where there is sufficient demand and have relevant up to date skills and training to deliver the service.

The service must be delivered by a CQC registered organisation and provide service standards as outlined in the NICE quality standard for End of Life Care for adults.

The service is for bereaved residents who are registered with a City and Hackney GP where the person who died was not under the care of another hospice, and whose anticipating a bereavement of someone with an advanced terminal illness.

NEL CCG believes that the current provider, St Joseph's Hospice, is the only provider of this type of bereavement counselling service in the City and Hackney area which has been specified. Since 2016 the CCG has contracted directly with St Joseph's Hospice for the bereavement service.

The CCG is publishing this notice to make clear to the market that it intends to continue to directly contract the incumbent provider, without competitive tendering, for the foreseeable future awarding new contracts through direct negotiation with the provider.

The CCG is also publishing this notice to advertise that interested parties, particularly other suppliers, can engage with the CCG at this time before the next contracting round. The CCG can use the information gained from this engagement activity to inform future commissioning cycles.

The engagement from suppliers must be in the form of a completed questionnaire sent to nelondon.contracting@nhs.net

Additional information: The CCG believes that no market exists for adult bereavement counselling services of this type in the City and Hackney area. This notice is being published for the purposes of early market engagement and the CCG reserves the right the vary its approach to the award of contract for these services.

The CCG is interested in engaging with any interested parties or stakeholders in relation to the services in this notice, not just from organisations that might be interested in taking part in a future competitive tender.

It should be noted that expression of interest forms will be evaluated and a judgement made about the potential of the organisation (submitting the form) to deliver a bereavement service, and this information will be used to make a judgement on whether a competitive market exists at present.

Submitting an expression of interest form is not a requirement of participation in any future competitive tender as this notice is not a call for competition.