Tenders for Dental Contracts

Winning a Dental tender

Dental tenders are ultimately commissioned by NHS England, whose ambition is to bring equity and excellence to the provision of care and treatment. They are rigorous and exacting in their requirements and have the needs of the patient at their heart. Tenderers must therefore demonstrate not only that they meet the service levels and compliance requirements, but also deliver outstanding quality, improved patient outcomes and value for money.

Showing understanding of the underlying motivations in NHS commissioning, and why the authority should award your practice the contract should be the core of any tender. You need to demonstrate, without doubt, that your offer is better than any large corporate that could potentially be better resourced or perceived as lower risk. As most dental tenders have set prices per UDA or per UOA for orthodontic tenders, there is little room for gaining a competitive edge on price. The evaluation and award of a dental contract therefore comes down to the quality of the written tender submission.

If you can demonstrate that you meet every requirement and your dental practice is exactly aligned to achieving NHSE ambitions, you stand a good chance of winning that contract.

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Tender top tips

Top tips for winning Dental tenders

1. Patient Focussed

The NHS is patient-centred and outcome based, so you must demonstrate that the patient is at the centre of your service planning and delivery with equity of care for all patients. The patient experience must be positive and timely; consider how you meet patient expectations, the prioritisation of patients, managing referrals and waiting lists and how you meet the needs of vulnerable and hard to reach groups. Ensure you have robust customer care and quality assurance processes in place (e.g. feedback mechanisms). Proven experience is key; what evidence do you have to show how you have implemented patient feedback into your practice?

2. Robust Clinical Governance

The quality of your service to your patients is critical. Ensure all aspects of your clinical governance are as robust as possible. Adherence to regulatory standards, clinical audits, clearly defined roles, responsibilities and accountabilities, safeguarding procedures, health and safety, complaints procedures, incident reporting procedures, risk management and patient safety all need to be described and evidenced. Ticking all the different compliance boxes the commissioning authority is looking for is vital as well as having appropriate processes and procedures for managing and monitoring continued conformance. From a business cost perspective, it’s also important to establish the most appropriate governance mechanisms, for example, is it essential to join the BDA Good Practice Scheme?

3. Comprehensive Mobilisation Plan

The NHS is risk averse so your mobilisation plan will need to demonstrate that your service will be in place from day one, all potential risks to implementation have been mitigated and the needs of existing patients have been taken into consideration. You need to show how you’ve incorporated all the elements of a thorough mobilisation, even if some of these are already completed e.g. transfer of patient data, transfer of staff, fit-out of new dental surgery, installing new OPG/Ceph machine etc.

4. Staffing

Your staffing structure must meet the qualifications, skill-mix and service delivery requirements detailed in the specification. Does your recruitment process follow NHS safer recruitment guidelines? What are your compliance checks? What is your training program? How do you ensure the retention of compliant, qualified, high-performing staff? How do you manage the conduct and performance of your staff? Consider whether TUPE might apply if you win the contract. The evaluators will be looking for confirmation that you have the right staff to deliver the contract, so ask yourself – what level of training should they have?

5. Strong Policies and Procedures

Are your practice policies strong, up to date and reviewed regularly? Do you have processes in place to make staff aware of changes? Is your Business Continuity Plan thorough, realistic and tested? You need to show how your dental practice is set up to ensure enough contingency in case of a disaster event, but again, you need to balance this with business costs and relative appropriateness. Do you really need a back-up compressor to win the contract?

6. Evidence

To provide the assurance the NHS needs, you need to provide the proven experience and evidence from where you have delivered successful services previously. You should include facts and figures wherever possible, detail staff qualifications and experience, use case histories and testimonials with names, dates, results, PAR scores and patient outcomes.

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Specific Dental tender issues to bear in mind

1. Lots & UOAs/UDAs

Tenders are broken down into Lots, with either a defined £value per Lot or a defined quantity of UOAs (Units of Orthodontic Activity) for Orthodontic tenders or UDAs (Units of Dental Activity) for dental tenders per Lot. Your tender response needs to be Lot-specific and aligned to the number of UOAs/UDAs. It is possible to bid for multiple lots; in these cases, there may be additional quality questions to answer to demonstrate your service can fulfil the needs of multiple Lots simultaneously, and that you have the financial stability to undertake this sort of solution.

2. Financial Model

Your whole proposal needs to be financially viable and include proof of funds for any up-front costs. Evaluators will cross reference everything, so the financial model needs to exactly reflect what you are promising to deliver in the other parts of the tender. If you are using 3 specialist orthodontists full-time, then these need to be fully costed in the financial model. If you are stating you’re going to install a new digital scanner as an innovation, has this been included in the set-up costs? The revenues generated from the price per UOA/UDA then need to be greater than set-up and ongoing costs, to demonstrate a positive cash-flow and ultimately that you have a viable business model.

3. Location & accessibility

The location and accessibility of your practice is vital in meeting NHSE ambitions to deliver equity of care for all patients. As such, descriptions of your practice must explain how you comply with the relevant guidance e.g. Disability Discrimination Act. What do you need to put in place to make your practice more accessible for all? E.g. is a hearing loop installed? How close is the nearest bus stop? Are 2 parking spaces going to be enough to demonstrate delivery of 15,000 UDAs/UOAs?

4. Transfer of patients

One of the consequences of winning a dental contract can be the need to transfer patients and their records from one practice to another. Your response needs to highlight a thorough understanding of this requirement, and detail how you will ensure continuing care and protect patient data.

5. Local oral care issues

This is a key area where smaller practices can really differentiate themselves from larger competitors. What can you demonstrate in your tender that shows you have a better understanding of local oral care issues than any other bidder? Are there key demographics you can include? Are there specific dental issues with parts of the local population that only your practice knows about and can deal with? Show the preventative measures you have put in place. Show how you engage with the community to reduce the impacts of poor oral health on NHS resources.

6. Data protection

All organisations that have access to NHS patient data and systems must use the DSP toolkit www.dsptoolkit.nhs.uk to provide assurance that they are practising good data security and that personal information is handled correctly and in accordance with GDPR.