Health and Social Care Tenders – Writing about Person-Centred Care

The NHS defines person-centred care as focusing on the needs of the individual, ensuring their preferences, needs and values guide decisions and outcomes, and introducing co-production and collaborative processes for the design and delivery of care packages and support. Person-centred approaches to the provision of care are applicable across many different models of care, including domiciliary care, extra care and supported living.

Our expert team of bid and tender writers receive specific training around writing health and social care tenders, ensuring they understand and emphasise how you integrate person-centred care into service provision – resulting in high-quality, competitive responses.

How person-centred care works in practice

Public health commissioners, integrated care boards and evaluators all agree that person-centred care involves giving service users power to manage their own health and make informed decisions about the care and treatment they receive. An article from the CQC highlights several key tenets of person-centred care, including:

• Involving individuals in decision-making and planning their care, allowing them to retain a degree of control over their lives
• Providing information about aspects of care (e.g. medication management) to support and facilitate each service user’s understanding
• Guaranteeing emotional and psychological support to service users by ensuring care is delivered in an open and non-judgemental manner
• Giving service users confidence and trust in staff who are providing care to the individual, ensuring they feel safe and supported.

Ultimately, person-centred care eschews a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to delivering care and support, in favour of tailoring plans to consider the individual needs, preferences and aspirations of each service user.

Illustrating person-centred approaches in bid writing

In accordance with best practice for bid and tender writing, you should include specific details around how personalised and person-centred care approaches are central to your service provision. A generic response or description of how person-centred care works in practice will only score middling marks with an authority’s evaluation team. For example, a response which includes the following –

‘The needs and preferences of each service user are considered when creating individualised care packages. This results in person-centred, outcome-focused service provision and supports maintaining high levels of service user satisfaction.’

– is unlikely to achieve high marks as there is minimal detail on the features and benefits of person-centred approaches.

Instead, you should give detail-oriented, practicable examples of how a person-centred approach will be integrated into service provision. To illustrate, when responding to a question around delivering person-centred care, you could incorporate the following examples:

‘Enabling service users to achieve their preferred outcomes by supporting them to retain their independence, e.g. cooking their own meals where possible.’

‘Respecting the cultural and religious beliefs of service users, such as scheduling calls or visits around their prayer schedules or assigning same-sex carers to assist with personal care.’

‘Liaising with close family members during the development and co-production of individualised care plans, ensuring the service user feels confident, supported and involved.’

‘Reviewing and adjusting care plans and strategies in accordance with the changing needs of the service user, facilitating a flexible service.’

In addition to giving examples, such an approach also emphasises the benefits of person-centred approaches, enabling you to gain higher marks from the authority and evaluating committee.

Why this is important in bids and tenders

Person-centred care is ‘central to good quality health services’ according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Ultimately, describing how and why you deliver person-centred care will reflect positively on the overall quality of your service delivery, including:

• The competency and capability of your carers to tailor care and support individually depending on the needs, characteristics and preferences of service users
• Ability to achieve high service user satisfaction by individualising care and respecting them as an individual, assuring the authority you are ideally positioned for the contract
• Delivering improved outcomes for service users looking to retain their current level of independence or become more independent (e.g. a reablement service)

Consequently, even if it is not featured as part of the quality question set, referencing your person-centred approaches in the delivery of care packages can be a key differentiator or ‘win theme’ within your submission. As many tenders are won and lost by a handful of marks, it could be the difference between a contract award and running a close second place.

Supporting you with health and social care tenders

In 2024, we built on our existing expertise to launch our new Executive Compass Care division, where bid and tender writers specialise in the production of high-quality, competitive health and social care tender submissions. Our bid writing and bid review services ensure support can be tailored or combined depending on the experience of your organisation – creating a truly bespoke service.

If you would like to learn more and receive a free, no-obligation quotation, our sales and marketing team are contactable at 0800 612 5563 or via email info@executivecompass.co.uk.