Introduction
The Fit for the Future procurement event held on 29 September 2008. This page contains presentations, materials, audio recordings and results from this event. We hope you find this information useful. If you have any queries about this event, please call Tobias Gould, Partnership Officer for Mental Health, on 0116 229 3050.
Summary
Fit for the Future was a procurement event for the mental health third sector in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. It challenged services about whether they were ready to tender for health and social care services. The event was designed to help the sector prepare itself for competitive tendering. The morning was spent considering the realities of the new procurement environment where organisations may have to tender for their own services, and the afternoon was spent looking at ways the tendering process could be supported.
Thank you to everyone who helped with this event. The event was funded by:
- Leicester City Primary Care Trust
- Leicestershire County & Rutland Primary Care Trust
- Leicester City Council
- Leicestershire County Council
- Rutland County Council
The event was supported by:
- The Voluntary Sector Partnership
- P3 - People, Potential, Possibilities
- CVS Community Partnership
- Voluntary Action Leicester
Presentations |
Audio |
Supporting Documents |
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|---|---|---|---|
National Agendas Shaping the Third Sector |
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Surviving and Thriving Through Procurement |
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Power to the People |
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Introduction to Sustainable Funding |
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Putting Bids Together |
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Outcomes - Providing a Social Return |
Notes
Martin Kinsella did not use PowerPoint for his presentations and as such these files are not available. As luck would have it, the audio file from his afternoon session on outcomes was too large to upload to this site. If you would like these files, please speak to Tobias, and we will do our best to get them to you.
To save the ‘Proposal Template’ as a template in Microsoft Word, please open the document and then select ‘save as’ from the file menu. In the ‘save as’ dialogue box there is a pull down menu at the bottom for ‘Save as type’ – select ‘Document Template’ from this menu and allow your computer to choose its own file path – this is usually a template folder on your local hard drive. Once you have saved the document close it. From then onwards when you want to open the ‘Proposal Template’ select new from the file menu and this will give you an option for ‘New from template’ – the ‘Proposal Template’ should be in the General Templates under this option. If in doubt please speak to your local IT expert on how to use templates.
Support Needed
A priority setting task undertaken at the end of the day showed that the most important types of support needed by the VCS to succeed in competitive tendering were:
- Involvement with commissioners and producing the specification (31%)
- Transparent tendering and scoring processes (30%)
- Having influential and senior ‘VCS Champions’ in health and social care (17%)
- Tender training and support (11%)
- Support for brokering partnership arrangements (8%)
The raw data from this task, and the methodology are shown in the tables below:
Elements of Support |
Score |
|---|---|
Transparency of processes in decision making (quality versus cost)/ with detailed constructive feedback/accountability/valuing local expertise/protocols in commissioning transparency |
21 |
Champions to promote VCS in specialist areas, eg. a few GPs, Philip Parkinson |
12 |
Involvement in producing the specification / realistic timescales |
12 |
Real involvement/ participation of key commissioners / decision makers in VSP Commissioning Group and the VSP (Voluntary Sector Partnership) |
10 |
Access to training and tender support / Training, support and sharing pitfalls/ Information toolkit |
8 |
Partnership working brokers/ Support for partnership development well before specs agreed |
6 |
Infrastructure support during process (advice, guidance and critical friends) |
2 |
Blow our own trumpet |
- |
Support in developing policies and procedures |
- |
Ways of relinking, VCS to enable them to work in partnership, have a worker connected to the NHS/PCT who can explain what you all do and who to contact |
- |
Respect our skills and try not to turn us into you |
- |
Method for the 'Support Needed' Task
At the end of the day attendees were asked to identify the elements of support they needed to meet the challenges of competitive tendering. These elements of support were then written onto single sheets of A3 paper, sorted into categories and scored. Each attendee had three sticky dots, and were asked to vote for their top elements of support. This task shows us the priorities for VCS support.