The Provider Selection Regime (PSR) is a set of rules that governs how NHS England, NHS trusts, and local authorities procure healthcare services. Pennine Care is an NHS trust and so is included in the organisations that need to follow these rules. The types of organisations these rules apply to are known together as “relevant authorities”.
These rules have been in place from 1 January 2024, and they replace previous procurement rules, which were based on the Public Contract Regulations 2015.
Two of the new rules are about sharing information online:
- We need to share an annual summary of how we applied these rules, counting each time we followed a specific process, and
- We need to check that we have followed the rules and share information about how we will improve if there are areas that we find we have not.
The rules are called regulations, and each of these regulations has a number. We have included the number of the regulations that we are sharing information about here so that you can easily see which parts of the rules we are talking about if you want to look it up online.
This is the first time we are sharing this information. It is for 15 months from when the rules came in on 1 January 2024, to 31 March 2025. In the future we will share information based on financial years, 12 months from 1 April to 31 March. This information must be published by 30 September each year.
You can read more about the Provider Selection Regime on the NHS England website.
Provider Selection Regime rules apply to relevant authorities that are buying healthcare services from another organisation. The rules say to choose one of these five ways to pick a provider of the services:
- direct award processes A – must be used where there is an existing provider (or group of providers) for the service and that provider (or group of providers) is the only one capable of providing the service.
- direct award process B – must be used where there is unrestricted patient choice of provider for a service.
- direct award process C – can be used where an existing provider is satisfying its contract and the new contract will not be materially different from the current contract.
- most suitable provider process – can be used where the relevant authority cannot or does not wish to use direct award process C but is of the view that it can identify the most suitable provider.
- competitive process – can be used where the relevant authority cannot or does not wish to use direct award process C or the most suitable provider process.
There are also rules for making changes to contracts and making urgent decisions to award or change a contract.
As well as the rules about awarding contracts and making changes to them, there are also rules about sharing information in public about decisions that have been made, and organisations that think the contract could have been awarded to them can ask an independent group of people to have a look at the decisions we have made.
If a decision to award a contract is made using direct award C, most suitable provider, or the competitive process, the relevant authority must put a notice on a government website called 'Find A Tender'. This is to make sure that other organisations who might think they could have been given the contract can ask questions before the contract is actually awarded.
This is called a standstill period. Questions that the relevant authority gets asked during the standstill period are called Representations. The relevant authority must answer these questions.
There is also a group of independent people that NHS England has put together called the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel. After representations, if the organisation that thinks they could have been given the contract is not happy with the relevant authority’s replies, and thinks the relevant authority has not followed the PSR rules properly, they can ask the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel to look into this. The panel can then give the relevant authority advice about how they could make changes to how they have followed the PSR rules.
Regulation 25 – annual summary
Explanation of the Provider Selection Regime annual summary table
We need to share an annual summary which includes information about the number of contracts we have awarded, representations, Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel work, and how many different providers we have contracts with.
There are some things about this table which might need explaining:
- The date that a contract is awarded does not have to be the same date that we made the decision, or the same date as a contract starts. We call the date we wrote to the provider to tell them that we had decided to give them the contract the “award date”.
- In the time between 1 January 2024 and 31 March 2024 there are 19 contracts that have been awarded to 18 providers. These numbers are different because one of the providers has been awarded 2 contracts.
- In the time period between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, we made decisions about contracts that start 1 April 2025, but we did not write to the provider until after 31 March 2025. These will be included in next year’s annual summary table.
Provider selection regime annual summary table
|
PSR Annual Summary |
1 January 2024 - 31 March 2024 |
1 April 2024 - 31 March 2025 |
|---|---|---|
|
Number of contracts directly awarded under direct award process A |
7 |
0 |
|
Number of contracts directly awarded under direct award process B |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of contracts directly awarded under direct award process C |
12 |
0 |
|
Number of contracts awarded under the most suitable provider process |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of contracts awarded under the competitive process |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of framework agreements concluded |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of contracts awarded based on a framework agreement |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of urgent contracts awarded |
0 |
2 |
|
Number of urgent modifications |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of Providers within the scope of PSR |
1 January 2024 - 31 March 2024 |
1 April 2024 - 31 March 2025 |
|---|---|---|
|
Total number of providers the relevant authority is currently contracted with |
18 |
19 |
|
Number of new providers awarded contracts |
0 |
2 |
|
Number of providers who ceased to hold any contracts with the relevant authority |
0 |
1 |
|
Representations |
1 January 2024 - 31 March 2024 |
1st April 2024 - 31st March 2025 |
|---|---|---|
|
Number of representations received in writing and during the standstill period in accordance with Regulation 12(3) |
0 |
0 |
|
Summary of the outcome of all representations received and of the nature and impact of those representations |
Not applicable |
Not applicable |
|
Reviews by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel |
1 January 2024 - 31 March 2024 |
1 April 2024 - 31 March 25 |
|---|---|---|
|
Number of requests for consideration received by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel |
0 |
0 |
|
Number of requests accepted by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel for consideration |
Not applicable |
Not applicable |
|
Number of requests rejected by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel for consideration |
Not applicable |
Not applicable |
|
Number of times where the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel advised the relevant authority to re-run or go back to an earlier step in a provider selection process under the PSR, and the number of times the advice was followed |
Not applicable |
Not applicable |
Regulation 26 – monitoring requirements
Relevant authorities need to check if they are following the rules, and they must share the results of these checks online every year. This report should include the processes they used, decisions made under the PSR, changes to contracts, and how they handled conflicts of interest.
A conflict of interest is when a person might be influenced by relationships (family, friends) or other connections they might have to another organisation, which might make a decision they make be unfairly good for that other organisation.
Pennine Care used Mersey Internal Audit Agency (MIAA) to complete this check on if we followed the rules. MIAA looked at these main areas:
- Do we have documents in place that help us to follow the PSR rules?
- Do we have good records of all the decisions that we made? Do these records show we have followed the specific rules of direct award C, most suitable provider or the competitive process?
- Do we have good enough processes to check if the providers are doing their jobs well?
- Do we have processes in place to find out about, and deal with, any conflicts of interest?
- Do we have a process to keep records of times we haven’t used PSR, and why we decided this?
- Do we have plans in place to share information online?
- Do we have a process in place to make sure we are telling ourselves how we are doing?
MIAA found that Pennine Care had “substantial assurance”, meaning that we have good systems in place to meet rules, and we are usually following these systems.
MIAA made four suggestions to us to help us improve.
They have given each of these suggestions a risk rating, which helps us understand how important to our following the rules each of their suggestions are. There are four risk rating levels: low, medium, high and critical.
They have suggested that we:
- Make sure we have written rules about the meetings where we make PSR decisions, which need to include which staff make the PSR decisions and what their specific job is in that meeting (low risk).
- Make sure that all our contracts are signed (medium risk).
- Make sure we have plans to train any new staff who come to for work for us who will be involved in the PSR (medium risk).
- Finish a document that we have started to write to help us follow the PSR rules (low risk).
We have agreed to all of these suggestions and have plans in place to make sure we have made the changes. This will help us be surer we are following the PSR rules.