Healthwatch Gloucestershire

Healthwatch Gloucestershire is the local independent consumer champion for people who use health and social care. Gloucestershire County Council is looking to commission a local Healthwatch service that uses the knowledge and strengths of our communities, uses technology to make health and social care information easy to find, and can influence the way services are provided. We want to make sure that Healthwatch Gloucestershire offers more opportunities for volunteers to get involved and more collaboration between the service and partners. Healthwatch Gloucestershire will: • be rooted in the community and act with a view to ensuring that it, its volunteers and its subcontractors taken together are representative of the local population, promoting community involvement in the commissioning, provision and scrutiny of health and care services; • capture, develop and harness the capacity of social care and health service users, their carers and families. Building on their experience, knowledge and skills to create an extensive volunteer workforce, with particular regard to building the capacity of minority and seldom heard communities; • commission bespoke research activities to identify and inform priorities working in collaboration with Gloucestershire Health and Wellbeing Board; • provide feedback to assure the quality of, and enable access to, information and advice. To focus on digital by default, but maintaining telephone and face-to-face contact for those that need it; • signpost to provide a more co-ordinated public information and advice offer with health and social care services; and • provide value for money: to be an organisation that makes the best use of its resources, avoids duplication with other bodies and works creatively with others to develop cost effective solutions to achieve priorities. We expect potential contractors to meet a number of minimum standards; these are detailed in the ITT. We advise all interested contractors to read the entire ITT and all documents referenced or linked to within the ITT carefully, to inform themselves about the opportunity and whether they would be interested in submitting a response. Deadline for submitting a tender response: 16th January 2017 at 10am. Please login to Procontract via www.supplyingthesouthwest.org.uk and register your interest in the opportunity. You will then be issued a confidentiality agreement which needs to be completed and sent via ProContract, in order to access the ITT documents. All questions related to this contract should be sent using the discussions function which will be available once you have logged in and registered your interest.