Health and Wellbeing Staff Support Text Service

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need of establishing a suitable health and wellbeing offer for all our staff. As a result, we have operated a national staff support text service since June 2020, to support our NHS staff who are under enormous pressure every day.

Common themes that have emerged from the text service in the past six months, that we want to continue supporting our staff with include -

Most common issues include:

The requirement is for a staff support text service, to continue to provide a psychological support offer for all NHS staff.

The service is provided for all health and care workers across the country. Currently over 3600 NHS staff have contacted the helpline since June 2020. On average the text service receives between 170-200 conversations a month from NHS staff.

The text service will offer NHS staff the opportunity to converse with trained crisis volunteers.

The requirement will be to run a 7-day service, 24 hours a day, that can operate nationally, and is able to cater to all groups and demographics.

This will need to be set up and delivered at a relatively fast pace, to enable a continuation in service for our workforce. There is a clinical risk attached to the necessity to keep the service continuous for our users, and therefore a gap in service will not be acceptable (a short period of transition between an old supplier and a new one can be agreed however). The existing contract is scheduled to end on the 5th August 2022.

Additionally, the supplier should be able to provide anonymized and vital data, to the commissioning organisation, to provide further understanding of emerging concerns and issues related to the health and wellbeing of our workforce. The content, structure and delivery of the reports should be open to change depending on the requirements of the commissioning organisation.

This will also conclude in an evaluation piece that will need to be carried out at intervals throughout the year. This will involve working with our evaluation lead to explore and deliver report/s through qualitative evaluation methods, such as interviews with users, to gain an in-depth understanding of service usage by staff.

Supplier Expressions of Interest

Interested suppliers should register on the NHS England & Improvement e-procurement system here: https://health-family.force.com/login