National Helpline for NHS and Social Care Staff

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 helpline since April 2020, to support our NHS staff who are under enormous pressure every day.

Common themes that have emerged in the past year, that we want to continue supporting our staff with include, but are not limited to -

• COVID-19
• Anxiety/Stress
• Depression/Sadness
• Suicide

The requirement is for a staff support helpline, to continue to provide a psychological support offer for all NHS staff. This will aim to be a service provided for all staff during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond.

The support line will offer NHS staff the opportunity to converse with trained crisis support workers, and if required, qualified clinical support where needed. The requirement will be to run a 7-day service, that can operate nationally, and is able to cater to all groups and demographics. The service will need to operate at the least, between 7:00am-11:00pm daily.

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. Finally, the supplier should be able to provide some expertise in supporting communications and marketing, to raise awareness of the helpline.

Description of Deliverables

• Helpline accessible 7 days a week, able to be setup and delivered nationally, to all ages of NHS staff, with clinical oversight, providing immediate, anonymous and confidential support for any health and care staff member, requiring mental health or crisis support at any time
• Regular service review meetings with commissioning organisation to support delivery of the service
• Regular service data and statistics reporting, including identifying current/emerging themes on the helpline
• Regular marketing and communications support
• Agreement to work with NHS England and Improvement on any deep dive or evaluation activities relating to the helpline

Pre-market Engagement

NHS England & Improvement are currently undertaking an options appraisal and as part of this have issued a Notice to the market to gauge supplier interest and capability in relation to continuing the delivery of this service.

Current thinking is that NHS England & Improvement will enter into a 6 month contract with an approximate total value of £300,000 exclusive of applicable VAT.

REGISTER YOUR INTEREST BY 23/07/21

Interested suppliers should read the details attached to the notice which specify further details about the requirement, how to register an interest in the possible procurement and the submission requirements for registering an interest.