The NHS secondary and community mental health, learning disability, dementia and autism services in Sheffield.

This contract as a whole are considered to fall within the scope of direct award process A on the basis that the NHS provider delivers our primary NHS provider contract for emergency and secondary care mental health related services. The Statutory Guidance support us take a realistic view of whether any other providers could actually deliver the contract. Realistically there are no other providers with the established infrastructure (both staffing, estates and NHS experience) to deliver the combination of services under these contracts to the scale which our local NHS providers deliver. This contract is based on all services being delivered under them considered as a package, as any attempt to split services off to commission differently would risk destabilisation of the rest of contract and the amount of resource required to undertake this task would be disproportionate the benefits received for our population. In addition, breaking these services down would risk losing the benefits of interdependence between the services (including services commissioned from these NHS providers which fall within the scope of specialised commissioning) which enables staffing resource to be flexed to meet pressures (e.g. treat complex long waiters), supports patient experience as flows between services are more fluid and issues can be easily resolved, encourages value for money by maximising economies of scale across services (e.g. when buying goods and services, using estates) and maximises innovation by encouraging service collaboration to support the delivery of the NHS Long Term Plan and other strategic requirements.