In the award notice, published on 26 January 2009, London Ambulance said the deal, worth around £12m, will including training, support, hardware and associated services.
It will also cover the integration of the new despatch system with other systems, both within the ambulance service and externally, and will be built around a commercial off the shelf product. The trust received 13 initial responses and two final offers for what it called the cad2010 contract.
The month also saw the publication of four large healthcare related tenders, with a total estimated value of up to £30.5m. In total, there were 16 health IT tenders published during January.
A couple were rather unusual. Manchester Primary Care Trust, in association with the city council, will spend £4m to £15m on a loyalty card style scheme which will reward Mancunians for healthy activity. Points4Life is the city's contribution to the England-wide Change4Life health campaign.
Perhaps the most challenging part of this deal, which will include non technological activities such as marketing and public relations, will be the tracking of "unstructured physical activity" such as cycling, walking and running. A spokesperson said this might involve participants wearing RFID tags while they take part in such exercise, and passing tracking stations around the city.
NHS Scotland published a tender to spend up to £10m on consultancy for a 'lean' transformation programme, which will include IT projects. Lean manufacturing is an established technique from vehicle makers, and involves eliminating wasted time, energy and material. It has been used by some English trusts to improve clinical techniques.
More conventionally, NHS Yorkshire and the Humber Commercial Procurement Collaborative published a tender worth between £500,000 and £5m for digital dictation software and hardware, including speech recognition technology and outsourced transcription services. The four year framework deal will cover any NHS trust in the Yorkshire and Humber region.
Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust, which includes Derriford Hospital, and NHS Plymouth, the city's primary care trust, jointly advertised for a telephony solution, asking for expressions of Interest "from experienced suppliers with the ability to support the needs of a large acute hospital and a large primary care trust".
The winning bidder will have to work with Plymouth's existing telephony systems, including the development and expansion of the current Mitel infrastructure and support for legacy Siemens equipment. The trusts did not provide an estimated contract value.
Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust also published tenders for digital dictation technology, while Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust awarded Dictate IT a £365,500 contract for providing such a system, for both medical and general secretarial services.
The past month has also seen the continuation of a recent increase in the number of tender cancellations. Kable's database of contract activity included 38 tenders cancelled in November, December and January, compared with 26 in the same three months a year earlier, a rise of 46%, with some citing the poor economic climate as a reason for the change of plan.
Four health IT tenders were withdrawn during January. Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust cancelled two, for a health management information system and for its existing management reporting system, neither of which were valued in the original tender notices. It said of the latter that "the requirement to tender this service has gone away".
Meanwhile, Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust ended its tender for a web based clinical benchmarking service, and County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust did likewise for its tender for a digital dictation system, although it said it might re-advertise. Again, neither of the original tenders had values attached.
All information is drawn from notices published in the Official Journal of the European Union. These, along with a monthly analysis of ICT tenders in all government sectors, are available to customers of KableDIRECT.
