Provision of Public Health Services - Pharmacy Primary Care Services

REPORT TO; Corporate Director of Health and Adult Services (HAS) in consultation with Executive Member for Public Health, Prevention and Supported Housing, including Sustainability and Transformation Plans.

DECISION DATE: Friday 14^th May 2021

PROPOSED RECOMMENDATION

It is recommended that the Authority extend the Approved Provider List (APL) for up to 3 years from 1 April 2022 until 31 March 2025 under Regulation 72 of The Public Contracts Regulations 2015.

BACKGROUND TO SUPPORT THE RECOMMENDATION

Primary Care Services in North Yorkshire are currently delivered by General Practitioners and Community Pharmacies and are commissioned and procured via an APL. The current list was published to run for a period of 5 years from 1 April 2017 expiring on the 31 March 2022. There was no provision to extend built into the contract. The existing APL has 99 Pharmacies.

The services that are currently delivered via Pharmacies are:

· Supervised Consumption Service

· Needle and Syringe Programme and Harm Reduction Service

· Targeted Primary Care Sexual Health

· NYCC Employee Flu Vaccination Service

· Stop Smoking

The current list was established to ensure the Council had a mechanism in place to deliver Public health services in community pharmacies. All performance and claims are made via Outcomes4Health. This is a web-based system which allows Providers to record the required information for each commissioned service and payment claims are automatically created on a monthly basis.

The Health Improvement Managers review the live data and produce performance reports, performance across the services is being met and there is good coverage across the county.

Primary care priorities for 2021/2022 are the delivery of the vaccination programme and support for the ongoing COVID response, as a result there is insufficient resource to carry out the required procurement process. Extending the APL will allow for the transformation work to be conducted by the team in HAS as well as allow time for a full review of the contract and a re-procurement to take place.

LEGAL AND GOVERNANCE COMPLIANCE

Procurement and Legal and Democratic Services have been consulted on the contract extension of the APL. The APL will be extended under Regulation 72 (1) (e) of the Public Contract Regulations 2015.

The APL will continue to operate in the same way so there will be no alteration to the overall scope of the contracts. During the extension period the council will continue to accept applications to the provider list.  This will ensure the APL does not prevent providers from applying to join the list.  During the extension period work will commence on the re-procurement of the arrangements.

RECOMMENDATION

It is recommended that the Authority extend the Approved Provider List for up to 3 years from 1 April 2022 until 31 March 2025.