The challenge

The requirement to respond to tenders for the provision of new services or the continuation of existing services is a fact of life for most NHS Trusts and other healthcare providers.

4OC has an experienced bid support team, who bring together NHS and commercial bid writing experience, including writing successful bids for private health care providers. We provide a range of services, from managing the whole tender response process to providing a half day coaching session to help you to prepare for a ‘pitching’ meeting with commissioners.

Our team understands that the clinicians and managers who have the knowledge needed to complete a successful bid have very busy ‘day job’.  We work hard to ensure that we draw on the knowledge and experience of these teams, but also provide a broad perspective from our collective decades of bid writing experience.

£300m in tenders won to date

100% bid win strike rate

The response

Over the past year we have supported two large NHS Foundation Trusts to develop tender responses for acute and community healthcare services to a combined annual value of approximately £300M. 

We have delivered the following:

  • Provided support for five bids, ranging from a major NHSE procurement of Specialist Services to a CCG procurement of community healthcare services across one locality
  • Analysed the tender response requirements, and identified ‘win messages’ for the bid
  • Developed a ‘tracker’ for each bid, showing the questions, word count and scoring mechanism.  We then use this to track who is working on each question, to ensure that we have good version control
  • Drafted bid responses and reviewed Trust responses
  • Provided coaching and preparation sessions for bidder’s interviews and pitching sessions, including the development of bidder’s presentations

The outcome

We are happy to say that all the Trusts we have worked with have secured 100% of the contracts for which we have been engaged. They have gone on to comment that our support helps to make bidding feel like a well- managed and well supported process.