Primary Care Based Mental Health Services including IAPT in East Sussex 21.794

This notice is to inform the market of the direct award of a 24-month contract to Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust for the provision of Primary Care Based Mental Health Services including IAPT in East Sussex for NHS East Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group ('the CCG') commencing 1st April 2022.

East Sussex Primary Care Based Mental Health Services consists of two core and integrated components. The first of which is the provision of Primary Care Mental Health Workers (PCMHW).

PCMHW are qualified mental health professionals that provide support to all GP practices in East Sussex. Their role is to support practices to manage patient care and enable timely directed access to appropriate mental health clinical, recovery and support services.

This includes advising on and assessment of referrals to the second component of the service, the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), programme.

The IAPT programme is a long standing nationally mandated programme for the treatment of adult anxiety disorders and depression. The national expectation as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan is that the number of people with anxiety disorders or depression who can access talking therapies through IAPT increase by an additional 380,000 per year to reach 1.9 million by 2023/24. IAPT services are characterised by three things, evidenced-based psychological therapies, routine outcome monitoring and regular outcomes focused supervision of staff providing the service.

The provision of Primary Care Based Mental Health Services including IAPT are a nationally mandated duty for CCGs to provide.

The CCG has directly awarded this 24 month contract to Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, to enable the current service to achieve the Mental Health Five Year Forward View IAPT expansion access standards, and facilitate nationally mandated Community Mental Health transformation objectives.

This will provide additional time for the CCG to complete and embed the necessary transformation work and to understand better and accurately specify, the new EWS framework to facilitate consideration of future opportunities, for provision of its functions as the Transformation Programme completes its journey.

Additional information: Please note: NHS England and Improvement have announced that the Sussex Health and Care Partnership, which is made up of all health and care organisations across East Sussex, West Sussex, and Brighton and Hove, has successfully met the criteria to become an Integrated Care System (ICS). An ICS is a way of working across health and care organisations that allows them to work more closely together, to take collective responsibility for the health and wellbeing of populations across large areas.

It is not anticipated that the statutory responsibility or accountability of the individual health and care organisations working as an ICS will be affected, save for the expectation that CCG organisations will be abolished and functions transferred to the ICS. As a result of these intended healthcare reforms, the Contracting Authority currently NHS East Sussex CCG, may change during the life of the contract.