Commissioning and adoption - Procurement frameworks

Procurement frameworks are agreements that enable NHS organisations to buy services and goods from one or more supplier. New suppliers cannot be added to an agreed procurement framework. These agreements usually last a maximum of four years before a tender for a new framework is published. You can access the procurement and savings calendar for an overview of upcoming tender activities. This enables new or existing suppliers to forward plan for procurement frameworks which are coming up for tender.

There are other places you can go to search for upcoming tenders and opportunities:

The suppliers must pass rigorous selection criteria to become part of a procurement framework.

Procurement frameworks that are already implemented within the NHS

  • Health Systems Support Framework. This enables NHS organisations to buy supportive services from innovative third-party suppliers including advanced analytics, population health management, digital and service transformations.
  • G-Cloud Framework. This enables providers to sell cloud services including hosting, software and support to the public sector including the NHS.
  • Dynamic Purchasing System. Unlike the other purchasing frameworks, suppliers can join this electronic system at any time. It is an 'open market' solution designed to give NHS organisations a pool of suppliers who they can buy works, services or goods from. This system is particularly beneficial for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who want to become NHS suppliers but have little or no experience in tendering for work with the public sector.

There are four NHS procurement hubs:

Contact the relevant procurement hub to find out more about becoming a supplier of services or goods in the NHS.

We hope you have found this guide useful and we wish you well on your innovation journey.

NHS Innovation Service, brought to you by the Accelerated Access Collaborative.