NHS Arden and Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit (AGCSU) on behalf of Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care Board (ICB) (referred to as the Commissioner) are seeking expressions of interest from providers who currently hold a general medical services (GMS) contract to deliver primary medical services as for Neath Hill Health Centre, as a branch surgery with the current patient list (by allocation while noting patient registration choice) from Saturday 1st July 2023.

Please note the deadline for expressions of interest is 10:00am Thursday 5th January 2023.

The Commissioner has made a strategic decision not to reprocure practices with a weighted list size below approximately 10,000 patients as stand-alone APMS contracts, and to look at alternative contracting models.

This is intended to ensure robust, resilient, and high-quality services for the population in the longer term, as we have found that smaller practices operated under APMS contracts in this area have frequently struggled with resilience and recruitment issues.

Neath Hill Health Centre has an actual patient list size of 3,983 (weighted 3,586.31) as of September 2022.

The ICB has a strong desire that the current premises located at 1 Tower Crescent, Neath Hill, Milton Keynes, MK14 6JY, are maintained within primary care ensuring adequate access, capacity, and resilience for general practice services.

The ICB has therefore decided the most appropriate way to achieve this aim is to offer this practice as a branch surgery with patient list to GMS providers, thus retaining the current premises with managed list dispersal to the successful bidder.

Practices outside the Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes area will need to ensure they have their home ICB's support for this opportunity.

As a branch of the successful bidder's existing GMS contract, the annual contract value represented by the branch surgery will reflect global sum rates.

This is purely an early engagement exercise and does not commit the Commissioners to carry out a procurement process.

Any subsequent procurement will be advertised separately and all organisations wanting to participate will need to respond to the procurement advertisement as and when published.

Current services will remain in place during this period in line with existing contracts and service level agreements.

The procurement will be advertised in accordance with the requirements of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (as amended) (the "Regulations") to the extent that the Regulations relate to services within the scope of Schedule 3 thereto (Social and Other Specific Services).

The Commissioner and AGCSU are, therefore, bound only by those parts of the Regulations applying to Schedule 3 services.