Health and Justice Vanguard Project

This contract award notice follows the publication of a Voluntary Ex-Ante Transparency Notice in Find a Tender on 12th August 2021, publication reference 2021/S 000-019666 to confirm the award of a contract to Virgin Care Ltd to deliver the Health and Justice Vanguard project across Essex.

Following the success of the POWER project across Southend, Essex and Thurrock, West Essex Clinical Commissioning Group have become a vanguard site to apply the framework for integrated care across greater Essex. This provides an opportunity for health, education, social care and health and justice partners to work together to co-design a model across Southend, Essex and Thurrock.

There is a cohort of vulnerable children and young people between the ages of 0-18 with complex needs who experience some of the highest levels of health inequality. The framework is designed using evidence-informed best practice to integrate and support services in order to intervene earlier in the pathway and stop children and young people's progression into the justice and secure estate, or an unnecessary Tier 4 hospital admission, or other inappropriate out of area placements.

The offer aims to build trauma-informed care and formulation-driven, evidence based whole system approach to providing integrated support and creating change for the most vulnerable.

The key objective for this Vanguard is to improve CYP wellbeing, displaying direct improvement in their mental health, and emotional regulation; especially to flourish in education and learning. Our vision is to ensure that children and young people are enabled to lead an improved purpose in life including education, that they are supported by staff to re-enter / remain in mainstream education where appropriate, and to enjoy and achieve through positive learning experiences.

Virgin Care Ltd currently delivers the Children's Pre-Birth - 19 service across Essex. This means that they are already embedded within the Essex system and have the right existing relationships required to make a success of the vanguard from the start. Because of this, they are also in a position to implement and mobilise the service within the timescales defined by NHS England as a condition of the funding.

Given the timebound issues of the funding arrangements it would not be feasible to conduct a procurement process to identify a provider in this instance.