Private Clinics and Independent Practitioners Bidding for NHS Work

Healthcare services are commissioned differently from goods and general services. The Provider Selection Regime governs how NHS bodies award clinical services, and it provides several defined routes, two of which can result in an award with no competitive process whatsoever.

This matters more to a small clinic than to anyone else. If your service sits on a route where the commissioner can continue with an existing provider, then a submission is not the lever. The relationship with the integrated care board and the case for change are.

Conversely, where a service is being competitively procured, the process is often fast, the documentation is lighter than a construction framework, and a well evidenced clinic can compete against much larger providers on quality.

Establish which situation you are in before anything else. We do that on the first call, from the notice or the correspondence you have received, and it takes minutes rather than a paid engagement.

Clinical governance comes first and it is not a formality. Named clinical lead, supervision arrangements, incident reporting, audit cycles, and how you evidence that they operate rather than exist as a policy. A clinic whose governance is genuinely run by one person has to be able to show what happens when that person is unavailable.

Regulatory registration is a gate. Where your activity requires registration, the registration has to be current, in the correct legal entity, and cover the activities you are proposing to deliver. Registration held by a predecessor entity or covering different activities is a compliance failure rather than a technicality.

Access, waiting times and capacity are scored in concrete terms. Commissioners want the number you can genuinely see per week, how you flex, and what happens when demand exceeds it. An optimistic capacity figure becomes a contractual obligation and then a performance problem.

Equity of access is weighted heavily and is where small providers frequently underperform on paper while doing well in practice. How a patient without English, without digital access, or without transport reaches your service is a question with a right answer, and it is rarely in the clinic's existing marketing material.

The most common failure is answering as a private business rather than as a provider of a public service. A private clinic sells convenience, speed and choice. A commissioner buys outcomes, equity and value for a population. The same clinic can offer both, but the submission has to be written in the second language.

The second is thin evidence. Private practice generates far less structured outcome data than an NHS service does, so a clinic that has treated hundreds of patients well may have little it can quote. Starting to capture that data is worth more than any single bid.

The third is scale anxiety, which cuts both ways. Some clinics bid for volumes they cannot deliver and then fail. Others assume they are too small to be considered and never bid, when commissioners frequently want local, specialist provision precisely because the large providers cannot offer it.

If your service genuinely cannot meet the specification, we will tell you on the first call. A clinic committing to a caseload it cannot staff creates a problem that outlasts the contract.

Get your registration and insurance current and in the correct entity, and check what activities they actually cover against what you intend to deliver.

Write down your clinical governance as it operates today rather than as it should look. Commissioners read a great deal of aspirational governance and are practised at spotting it.

Start recording outcomes in a form somebody else could verify. Even a simple, consistently kept dataset over six months is worth more in a submission than a decade of undocumented good practice.

Talk to your integrated care board before a procurement exists. Where a commissioner is not currently buying what you offer, the useful work is making the case that they should, and that conversation happens long before any notice is published.