Cornwall council has published a pre-tender for various shared services, for itself and four local NHS trusts, covering areas including IT infrastructure and devices, document management, helpdesk and consultancy services.
According to a notice published in the Official Journal of the European Union, the council is looking for a 10 year contract in partnership with local health organisations including Royal Cornwall hospital trust and community health organisations. The council says it is looking for a private sector company or a consortium to deliver the services and "to make substantial investment within public sector services of Cornwall".
"Cornwall council and its local health partners share a vision that high quality shared services will be delivered and traded from Cornwall. These operations will take advantage of Cornwall's competitive advantages which include its labour force, infrastructure, environment, culture and brand," says the notice. "We think we can best achieve this vision through an incremental partnership with a major organisation that will offer us commercial, consulting and implementation expertise."
It goes onto say that initially one strand of work will focus on a number of projects to create "genuinely shared services for the council and health partners", while another strand will look at establishing the trading joint venture.
"Over time we expect additional projects to come on stream and that the balance of activity will switch from transforming the existing organisations to delivering excellent services through the trading joint venture," adds the notice.
The chosen supplier will also be expected to review, benchmark and provide implementation options for IT strategies for infrastructure and devices across Cornwall. This will include networks, client devices – personal computers and handheld devices – data centres and telephony.
The authority hopes that the deal, worth between £20m and £200m, will support the implementation of more joined-up procurement and commissioning between the council and health organisations.
Last month Cornwall's cabinet agreed on proposals to set up a new shared service organisation in partnership with a private company for the delivery of a range of services. It said that it could save about £2.5m through the plans and create about 375 new jobs by 2018.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Sade Laja
Quelle/Source: The Guardian, 04.08.2011
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