On Demand Availability of Drugs for Palliative Care

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    "id": "ocds-h6vhtk-065b4f-2026-02-24T15:40:11Z",
    "date": "2026-02-24T15:40:11Z",
    "ocid": "ocds-h6vhtk-065b4f",
    "description": "Award decision-makers: NHS Surrey Heartlands ICB Medicines Optimisation Board (MOB) - 21st January 2026 NHS Surrey Heartlands ICB Commissioning, Contracting and Commercial Committee (CCC) - virtual resolution 27th January 2026 NHS Surrey Heartlands ICB Executive Committee - 4th February 2026 Julia Powell, CEO, Community Pharmacy Surrey and Sussex declared a conflict of interest and did not attend MOB. Key Criteria were ranked as follows and evidence gathered in support of making this award is detailed: Joint Most Important Key Criteria Integration, collaboration and service sustainability * This service is fully integrated into Surrey Heartlands' end-of-life care pathway and supports collaborative working across community nursing, primary care, hospices, social care and voluntary sector teams. * The service can be relied upon by healthcare workers and recipient patients. * The commissioned pharmacies operate as reliable neighbourhood hubs with established communication channels, shared escalation processes and consistent participation in system-wide palliative care groups. * Concentrating delivery into a defined set of providers strengthens resilience, enables collaborative stockholding, and supports a sustainable, experienced workforce. * This integrated and coordinated model ensures continuity of care, reduces service fragmentation, and provides a stable and sustainable platform for meeting urgent palliative care needs across Surrey Heartlands. Joint Most Important Key Criteria Improving access, reducing health inequalities and facilitating choice * This service directly improves access to urgent palliative care medicines and reduces health inequalities by ensuring geographically distributed, trained pharmacies are available to supply essential medicines promptly and reliably, including during extended and out of hours periods. * The model supports patients to remain and die in their preferred place of care, reducing avoidable emergency admissions and removing barriers caused by transport, mobility, digital exclusion or variable local pharmacy provision. * Consistent stockholding and ICB-led monitoring ensure equitable, high quality access across all Surrey Heartlands communities, including those who are vulnerable, underserved or living in rural areas. * This integrated, person centred approach supports meaningful patient choice and ensures fairness and consistency in end-of-life care. Joint Second Most Important Key Criteria Quality and Innovation * In addition to meeting the service requirements, the selected pharmacy demonstrates enhanced quality and innovation through proactive stock management, proven out-of-hours responsiveness, strong integration with local palliative care teams, structured workforce development, and innovative communication processes. * These elements provide added value beyond the standard specification and ensure safe, reliable, and timely access to essential palliative care medicines for Surrey Heartlands residents. Joint Second Most Important Key Criteria Value * Commissioning a defined number of pharmacies to deliver ODADPC provides significant system-level value. * Concentrating stockholding avoids the expense and waste associated with system-wide procurement of low turnover, high cost medicines, and ensures cost-effective use of resources. * Reliable, timely access to palliative care medicines prevents avoidable ambulance callouts, urgent care contacts, and unplanned hospital admissions, generating substantial financial savings. * The model delivers operational efficiencies for community teams by reducing service duplication, repeat visits, and unnecessary travel. * Standardised processes across commissioned pharmacies streamline training, reporting, and contract management, further reducing overheads. * Collectively, these elements demonstrate clear added value beyond baseline service delivery and support the case for a PSR Direct Award C. Third Most Important Key Criteria Social Value * The ODADPC service delivers significant social value by enabling patients to remain at home in their final days and weeks, supporting their preference for a dignified, familiar environment and allowing greater connection with family, friends and community networks. * This reduces the financial and practical burden on families who would otherwise face extensive travel and hospital parking costs, while also decreasing carbon emissions associated with repeated hospital visits. * Improved access to urgent palliative medicines prevents crises that can distress patients and carers, supporting carer resilience and enabling people to balance caring with other responsibilities. * Commissioning local pharmacies sustains local employment, upskills the community workforce and strengthens neighbourhood-based care. * Collectively, this service provides clear social, economic and environmental benefits for Surrey Heartlands' population and aligns with ICS priorities on reducing inequalities, supporting carers and delivering sustainable community-based care. This is a Provider Selection Regime (PSR) intention to award notice. The awarding of this contract is subject to the Health Care Services (Provider Selection Regime) Regulations 2023. For the avoidance of doubt, the provisions of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and the Procurement Act 2023 do not apply to this award. The publication of this notice marks the start of the standstill period. Representations by providers must be made to decision makers by midnight on 09/03/2026. This contract has not yet formally been awarded; this notice serves as an intention to award under the PSR. Any written representations should be sent to robert.kitt1@nhs.net",
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        "title": "On Demand Availability of Drugs for Palliative Care",
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        "description": "The aim of the service is to provide immediate and consistent access to palliative care medication across NHS Surrey Heartlands (and wider, work has been done collaboratively across Surrey) with the ultimate aim of providing the best level of End-of-Life care and reducing inappropriate admissions in the last weeks of a patient's life. To improve access for people to these specialist medicines when they are required by ensuring prompt access and continuity of supply. To support users, carers and clinicians by providing them with up-to-date information and advice, and referral where appropriate.",
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                "description": "The purpose of this service is to support patients to live and die in their place of choice and to reduce inappropriate admissions in the last weeks of their life, a locally commissioned service (LCS) has been developed for the on-demand availability of palliative care drugs through a number of selected pharmacy contractors in the area. This service supplies specialist medicines for palliative care, the demand for which may be urgent and/or unpredictable via several pharmacy contractors. The pharmacy contractor will stock a locally agreed range of specialist medicines and will make a commitment to ensure that users of this service have prompt access to these medicines during their hours of opening. These drugs have been agreed by the service providers and are considered to cover most \"urgent\" requests. The pharmacy will provide information and advice to the user, carer and clinician in line with locally agreed palliative care guidelines. They may also refer to specialist centres, support groups or other health and social care professionals where appropriate. The palliative care drugs list and details of pharmacies will be circulated to all primary care prescribers, including the out of hours service, District Nurses, Palliative Care Nurses, Community Pharmacies, Hospital Pharmacists and Palliative Care Consultants so that all the appropriate health care professional are aware of what is reasonable to expect to be available. \"Palliative care\" pharmacies will be used mainly in an emergency situation, where the drugs cannot be obtained by the local Community Pharmacy within an appropriate timescale. The Commissioner intends to award a contract to an existing provider following direct award process C. The contract duration is 24-months, from 01/04/2026 - 31/03/2028. The lifetime value of the contract is PS2,244.00. This procurement has been carried out by NHS South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit (SCW) on behalf of the Commissioners.",
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        "procurementMethodRationale": "This is a Provider Selection Regime (PSR) intention to award notice. The awarding of this contract is subject to the Health Care Services (Provider Selection Regime) Regulations 2023. For the avoidance of doubt, the provisions of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and the Procurement Act 2023 do not apply to this award. The standstill period begins on the day after the publication of this notice. Representations by providers must be made to the relevant authority by midnight on 09/03/2026. This contract has not yet formally been awarded; this notice serves as an intention to award under the PSR. Any written representations should be sent to robert.kitt1@nhs.net"
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