Surrey children's community health services procurement

Surrey children's community health services procurement

Children’s community health services in Surrey comprise a wide range of community-based services that support physical and emotional health and wellbeing amongst children and young people from birth up to 19 years of age and their families and carers.

The local NHS in Surrey and North-East Hampshire along with Surrey County Council are seeking to secure a provider for Children’s Community Health Services across Surrey, and North-East Hampshire to start delivering services on 1 April 2025.  The current contracting arrangement began in 2017.

Overview of current services

Children’s Community Health Services comprise a wide range of community-based services that support physical and emotional health and wellbeing amongst children and young people from birth up to 19 years of age and their families and carers. These services focus on:

  • preventing ill health
  • promoting and supporting child development
  • providing targeted and specialist medical, nursing and therapy services

These services are currently provided by Children and Family Health Surrey under an alliance agreement between Central Surrey Health, First Community Health and Care, and Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. This contracting arrangement began in 2017.

Feedback from families and staff

Engagement and conversations with children, young people, families, carers, and professionals has formed the foundation for a new and innovative approach to delivering Children’s Community Health Services. Families, children, and young people have told us that they want to be able to access support easily and need help navigating complex pathways and services; they want to understand what is available to them and how long they may have to wait. 

For many, their experience of Children’s Community Health Services is positive and their needs are met in a supportive and caring way, as is reflected in recent Care Quality Commission reports. However, there are long waits for some services and in some cases children, young people and families are not receiving services that they rely on in a timely manner and/or at the most appropriate/convenient location. Families would also like choice in how they receive their appointments and support. These are some of the areas we aim to address with the new approach.

Engagement report

Engagement with the community, children, young people and their families is critical to the co-development of services.

Surrey Heartlands used several approaches to ensure the voice of our community is heard one of which was to commission a company called Spark the Difference. They were asked to:

  1. Understand the current experience of children, young people, their families and carers.
  1. Understand what works well, what isn’t working and where improvements are needed for both service users and professionals.
  1. Ensure insight from lived experience shapes community health support for children, young people, their families and carers going forward.  

Between June and November 2022, Spark the Difference engaged with 96 service users, 43 staff members, conducted 11 site visits, attended local community events and received support from 17 system partners and groups with over 300+ written contributions.

The feedback from this report has been instrumental in shaping our service model and specifications.

We hope you enjoy reading this valuable and informative work.

Childrens Community Health Services Engagement Report [pdf] 7MB

Market engagement

Market engagement took place in April and July 2023.

Summaries of the 1:1 sessions and in person event can be found here:

For more information, please contact chw.commissioning@surreycc.gov.uk

Draft service specification

The specification provides an overview of our exciting and innovative service model for Children’s Community Health Services in Surrey.

Draft Childrens Community Health Service Overarching Specification [pdf] 1007KB