Issue - meetings

To receive a report from the Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care and Public Health and the Director of Public Health, and to consider and endorse or make recommendations to the Cabinet Member on the proposed decision to extend the current contract for a further two years, until 30 September 2017.

Ms K Sharp, Head of Public Health Commissioning, was in attendance for this item.

1.            Ms Sharp introduced the report and explained that the proposal to extend the contract arrangements for a further two years was covered by an option clause built in to the current contract. She responded to comments and questions, including the following:-

a)    as the County Council commissioned the service on behalf of NHS England, it benefitted from a reciprocal arrangement of having two full-time posts in the public health team fully funded by NHS England;

b)    the commissioner had contact with women’s prisons in Kent, Surrey and West Sussex, giving an opportunity to make and strengthen connections between services delivered in prisons and services delivered in the community;

c)    when the contract came to be re-let in the future it was likely that other providers might bid, as the current provider had not been the only bidder on the previous occasion; 

d)    the proposed decision, on which the committee was being asked to comment, was to take up the option of extending the existing contract for a further two years, making five years in total. The contract would then be re-tendered in time to re-let the services at the end of the five-year period; and

e)    a view was expressed that the proposed extension seemed to be the most sensible option as the reported performance of the current provider had been good.  

2.         RESOLVED that the decision proposed to be taken by the Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care and Public Health, to invoke the contract extension option within the Kent and Medway Prison-based Substance Misuse Service contract, until 30 September 2017, taking account of comments made by the committee, be endorsed.