The Provision of Education Quality Assurance Services Contract

Description

We're the independent regulator of more than 758,000 nurses, midwives and nursing associates across the United Kingdom. Our vision is safe, effective and kind nursing and midwifery care for everyone. We promote high professional standards for nurses and midwives across the UK, and nursing associates in England. We maintain the register of professionals eligible to practise. We investigate when nursing or midwifery care goes wrong - something that affects less than one percent of professionals each year. Safe, kind, effective care is at the heart of what we do and by promoting professionalism, we help to inspire confidence among the public and pride among nurses, midwives and nursing associates. The responsibilities of the NMC for education and training are clearly set out in the Nursing and Midwifery Order (The Nursing and Midwifery Order, Part IV Education and Training, 2001). Our education standards shape the content and design of programmes to make sure that nurses, midwives and nursing associates are consistently educated to high standards and able to deliver safe and effective care not only when they join our register, but throughout their careers. As part of our regulatory function, we approve education institutions against our education standards, and then monitor. These programmes include pre-registration nursing and midwifery, prescribing, and post-registration - such as Specialist Community Public Health Nursing and Specialist Practice Qualifications (General Practice Nursing, District Nursing). We currently have over 95 approved education institutions delivering nearly 2,000 nursing, midwifery, and nursing associate programmes. In 2018, we embarked on an ambitious programme of developing new education standards, including standards of proficiency. In 2019, we implemented our new quality assurance framework, defining our expectations around quality assurance of our education and training programmes and outlining a more proportionate, risk-based approach to approvals and monitoring. The culmination of this programme of reviewing our education standards, standards, and we expect all post-registration programmes to be approved against these new standards by August 2024. Following the implementation of these post-registration standards, we will be commencing a programme of work to consider our role and approach to regulating Advanced Practice. This work is due to commence in 2023. As we move beyond approvals against our new standards, we are shifting our focus towards ongoing monitoring of approved programmes and education institutions. With the end of our current contract in 2024 we are Looking to procure a new QA Service Provider. This will be an exciting new opportunity as our work moves away from approvals, instead focusing more on monitoring in an efficient, data-driven and risk-based way, alongside the ongoing approval of any new providers or programmes. The QA Service Provider will need to work in close partnership with us, reflecting contemporary practice, supporting our ambitions, and providing flexibility. As we've implemented our QA Framework, we've developed our ideas, received feedback from stakeholders and taken this on board to develop our requirements for the future. We're also developing our equality, diversity, and inclusion ambitions, as we've published our EDI objectives, whilst we continue our Ambitious for Change programme. We would welcome early opportunities to discuss these requirements in more detail and explore your organisation's ambitions in this space, as we develop our specifications in more detail. We are planning to go out to Tender in summer 2023. Lot 1: Provision of all services related to the quality assurance of nurse, midwife, and nursing associate education, including approval of programmes against new programme standards of education, modification, and endorsement of programmes for delivery in other locations. Additionally, the monitoring of approved programmes in line with our data driven approach to quality assurance. This also includes the recruitment, training, and management of visitors to undertake those activities, provision of supporting material and guidance for education institutions, first line stakeholder communication, and strategic input into the practical implementation of the QA Framework. Additional information: Please note no tender documents have been issued at this stage -the functional requirements and capability specification will be published in the future Invitation to Tender documents with the Find a Tender Contract Notice. The Nursing and Midwifery Council has initiated an expression of interest exercise and it is intending to undertake pre-market engagement in early 2023. These meetings with interested suppliers will be informal and will be an opportunity for suppliers to ask questions and find out more information about a potential new competitive procurement exercise for the Provision of Education Quality Assurance Services. We will be issuing an Expression of Interest form which is to be completed electronically using the NMC e-Sourcing portal ('e-Sourcing Portal'). You are required to complete the form and confirm whether your organisation is interested in participating in the forthcoming pre-market engagement event in early 2023 For more information about this opportunity, please visit the Atamis e-Sourcing portal at https://nmcprocurementportal.force.com/s/Welcome Please note the following project name and reference number allocated to this procurement process ('Procurement') within the e-Sourcing Portal. Project Name: Expression of Interest for The Provision of Education Quality Assurance Services Project Reference: C1098 Before completing the Expression of interest Form, potential bidders should ensure that the email address that has been used to register will be checked regularly as the e-Sourcing Portal will generate automatic notifications to the registered email address wherever there are updates, changes or messages in relation to planned Market Engagement exercise. Bidders should also check that their organisation details are correct and up to date. For an opportunity to take part in this procurement exercise please register with our free tendering portal at https://nmcprocurementportal.force.com/s/Welcome . You will need to complete a short form to register, providing company details, categories you can provide services for, and user details including an email address that will be used as your login details. If you choose to opt in, the Expression of Interest form will be available to you in week commencing 28 November 2022 via our Atamis tendering portal which needs to be completed and returned via portal by 31 January 2023. (Please make sure you check regularly our e-sourcing portal for Find opportunities using the abovementioned project reference). Should the NMC decide to proceed, you will receive further details in due course.