Domiciliary Care Tenders

As you would expect home care, or domiciliary care tenders are plentiful. After all, it is a growing business, the number of old people is increasing and the current government policy is to provide care in the home for as long as possible. Domiciliary care allows people to remain at home rather than use residential based nursing care, and allows them to retain their independence for longer. It is estimated that the UK domiciliary care market is around £2.7 billion. The demographic trend, government policy, increased home ownership and an increasing desire of people to remain as independent as possible, for as long as possible means it will only grow and grow. It is estimated that around 340,600 people receive home care every week.

Domiciliary care is also cheaper than residential care, so we can safely say there will be lots of tenders for domiciliary care, across the whole of the country on a permanent cycle. This means plenty of opportunities to hone your domiciliary care tender writing skills or not, as the case may be.
There is quite a range of domiciliary care services, they have the same core delivery elements but can have subtle nuances between tenders. For example, reablement, enhanced etc.

Typical activities include;
• Getting out of bed and dressing
• Undressing and going to bed
• Washing
• Assistance to the toilet
• Meal preparation
• Cleaning, laundry or other domestic tasks
• Shopping
• Sitting with or accompanying to appointments/outings
• Supervision of medication
• Night care
• 24-hour support

There are no real typical questions in a domiciliary care PQQ and tender because as with all industries tenders do vary and they are all different. I have tried to select a couple of themes and questions that you may wish to consider

• The dignity challenge
• Personalisation-Provide a brief summary of a service that you have provided and how you have altered those services to encompass the principles of personalisation
• How did you set and measure the outcomes
• Experience and expertise of undertaking contracts/services of a similar nature. With particular reference to ‘Service Delivery’.
• Does your company currently use / would be able to have in place at the start of the contract a Real Time Monitoring system
• Does your company operate a proactive approach inviting customer opinions / feedback and mechanisms for collating / reporting & acting upon the feedback in your current contracts
• Outline the key milestones, with relevant timescales, of the project plan that you will implement to manage the handover process and also build capacity to accept new care packages whilst providing quality services

The list can go on but the final one to remember is the business continuity plan. Every single domiciliary care tender or PQQ will ask if you have one. Some will ask you to include the plan with your submission; others will simply ask you confirm that you do have one in place. If you do not have one, our advice would be to create one. Many PQQ and tenders request a business continuity plan but in reality the services that the companies are delivering will not be so critical if things go wrong. Domiciliary care is different. People depend on you to deliver the services in the way that you have promised and at the stated time. Failure to do so could result in serious problems, even illness or worse.

We can complete all of your domiciliary care PQQ and tenders and can also write your business continuity plans.
There are a great many PQQ and tenders available and you must ensure you are ready.