Awarded to TOAD

Start date: Friday 25 September 2020
Value: £250,000
Company size: SME

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

SLaMST20 - 084 COVID Digital Delivery for whole class mental health programme for primary schools

9 Incomplete applications

8 SME, 1 large

6 Completed applications

6 SME, 0 large

• Published: Friday 21 August 2020
• Deadline for asking questions: Friday 28 August 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Friday 4 September 2020 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Summary of the work: Transform exisiting clinician delivered sessions into engaging digital modules with appropriate technical infrastructure for teacher-led classroom delivery. Build on existing content and characters and bring them to life via dynamic mix of media including animation and videos. Ensure interactivity, developmental appropriateness and means of integrating outcome measurement.
• Latest start date: Friday 18 September 2020
• Location: London
• Organisation the work is for: South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
• Budget range: Up to £250,000 primarily to deliver the mixed media solution (including animation) for 25 modules and to ensure there is appropriate hosting/access manaagement to the programme for schools.

About the work

• Why the work is being done: CUES-Ed is an innovative CAMHS programme providing primary aged children access to effective early intervention to manage difficulties, build emotional resilience and prevent mental health difficulties escalating. Teaching children independent skills and effective strategies is fundamental to building the resilience and capacity they need to transition back to school following the pandemic and to move into healthy adolescence and adult life. 25 modules of mixed media are envisaged of approximately 20 minutes each –incorporating exisiting character design and using existing clinical content. Programme development will need to commence prior to October 2020, with delivery by November 2020.
• Problem to be solved: Due to the pandemic, the mode of delivery needs to change for schools reopening in Sep 2020. The current delivery model of clinicians visiting multiple schools is no longer appropraite and a remote solution is needed. Thus, exisiting clinician delivered sessions need transformed into an engaging, interactive and clinically robust digital programme that can be delivered in classrooms under the guidance of teachers.
• Who the users are and what they need to do: Primary schools will use the Digital programme (developed by the provider) to benefit whole classes of children (7-10 years). Specified classroom teachers will receive associated online training and support to lead the digital programme (this will be provided by SLaM and is not a requirement of the provider) – in order to improve whole class mental health knowledge and well-being. Importantly, children identified as more vulnerable (those scoring within a clinical range on self-report measures of wellbeing/distress and emotional and behavioural difficulties) will be expected to show significant improvement following the CUES-Ed programme.
• Early market engagement: We have received feedback from schools that they are keen for a remote solution to support the mental health of their children especially after the challenging circumstances of the pandemic. We have also reached out for solution ideas with companies who have supported us with previous digital delivery – and expect a combination of real-life video and animation using our existing characters plus interactive exercises on a platform suitable across both Health and Education settings.
• Any work that’s already been done: The CUES-Ed programme is well established and has worked with over 6000 children with successful outcomes (reference service evaluation). As such - clinical content is established, alongside existing branding and high-spec characters and design. There is an existing website: www.cues-ed.co.uk with interactive web-based modules for children who have completed the whole class programme in school (Kids Zone) and for children with chronic illness to complete at home (Home Learning). We envisage continued use of the Kids Zone for these purposes – with relevant updates and improvements
• Existing team: The CUES-Ed programme was created by a small team of Clinical Psychologists and Cognitive Behavioural Therapists - as a result of feedback gathered over many years from children they have worked with in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. The Team continue programme development in consultation with children and teachers and strive to tackle stigma and accessibility and to improve mental health resources available to all children. The supplier will also have contact with Trust Digital Services and collaboration with graphic designer who has created existing design and website (Kalo Digital)
• Current phase: Not started

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: South London and Maudsly NHS Foundation Trust, Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, Camberwell, London SE5 8AZ, however this is a digitisation project in a Trust that is currently enabled to work remotely so there is flexibility with the actual location.
• Working arrangements: Mainly off-site, with visits to our offices as required by the project.

Additional information

Skills and experience

Buyers will use the essential and nice-to-have skills and experience to help them evaluate suppliers’ technical competence.

• Essential skills and experience:
  • Significant, demonstrable experience full life-cycle of development of large, public-facing remote clinical tools/ animation dscovery user research, stakeholder management, design, build, content creation migration, hosting, maintenance, support
  • Full service digital agency with a full range of roles including design, IA, UX, technical, content strategy, project management, analytics
  • Experience of working with large NHS or public-sector organisations, and knowledge of the health technology environment and evolving technical standards from NHS Digital
  • Evidence of providing responsive customer support service; relationships with satisfied clients
  • Evidence of creating and producing clinical digital / animated information that supports digital inclusion and content types that optimise engagement
  • Can demonstate experience of rapid turnaround delivery, partciularly with the unique aspects currently experienced due to COVID
  • Ability to deliver high quality but low technical maintenance digital solutions
  • Evidence of delivering effective training on the use of solutions - training for different levels of staff / user (eg teachers) should be offered to support initial rollout
  • Can provide options for translation
  • Can explore options for personalisation and user authentication
  • Can demonstrate process for keeping the application components up to date
  • Experience with delivering solutions meeting the needs of CAMHS, ie mental health and well-being of children and young people.
  • Experience in agile user testing at appropriate times in the project to make sure that the solution meets the needs established at UX and design stage before launch
  • Experience running UX and design workshops with staff, service users and other stakeholders to understand their needs
  • Demonstrate full compliance with government’s accessibility standards, GDPR and other EU regulations for public sector websites and be in line with WCAG2.1AA accessibility standard, without compromising on design quality.
• Nice-to-have skills and experience: Experience of delivering animation that is reflective of specialist media quality as well as mental healthcare clinical evidence

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.

• How many suppliers to evaluate: 3
• Proposal criteria:
  • Technical solution
  • Approach and methodology
  • How the approach or solution meets the user needs
  • Estimated timeframes for the work
  • How the supplier has identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them
  • Team Structure
  • Value for money
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • demonstrate they are thinking about the Trust's future
  • demonstrate expertise and experience to understand emerging technology that will make a difference to our user
  • demonstrate that we are taking advantage of technology that adds true value
  • work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers where necessary
  • demonstrate they are ready to challenge the status quo
  • demonstrate they are champions of equality, diversity and digital inclusion
  • show they are innovative and forward thinking
  • share knowledge and experience with clients
  • provide honest feedback
  • use innovative, cost effective techniques to engage
  • take responsibility for the quality of their work
  • be transparent and collaborative when making decisions
  • work well with clients of varying technical expertise
• Payment approach: Capped time and materials
• Additional assessment methods:
  • Case study
  • Work history
  • Reference
  • Presentation
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  60%

  Cultural fit

  20%

  Price

  20%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. Can you please explain the scoring criteria for each question and confirm whether all questions all weighted equally?: Criteria Technical competence (60%) is evaluated based on answers to the Proposal criteria and all questions are weighted equally. ; ; Criteria Cultural fit (20%) is evaluated based on answers to the Cultural fit criteria and all questions are weighted equally. ; ; The Price criteria (20%) is evaluated based on answers to the Payment approach and lowest price will receive the highest score. ; ; The Additional assessment methods below can be used by the supplier to support their answers to the Proposal criteria and Cultural fit criteria.
• 2. Can you detail any technical constraints, such as architectual guidelines that might determine appropriate technology, platforms and technical skills required?: Outside of the specifcation provided, there are no specific technical constraints. Please note SLaM actively uses Office365 technology hosted on an Azure platform
• 3. The opportunity is to design and build the digital service. Can you provide more information as to what handover should be provided to internal teams within the proposal or whether the provider is expected to provide hosting and support?: We do not evnsiage long term hosting and support. We expect a detailed handover (with appropriate levels of training and necessary documentation) to enable the expert Digital Services team to provide ongoing hosting support and upgrading.
• 4. Can you confirm the contract duration please?: Initial delivery of animations and platform to be delivered and needs to support school in October. Delivery of full package is expected to be swift although successful supplier should support ongoing refinement based on feedback. We don’t envisage it being longer than a year.
• 5. What are the expected key features of the supporting platform?: They are: enabling the hopsital to provide controlled access to schools, for schools to present animations, to facilitate 2 way conversation between the school and the hospital, To provide a record of system usage and comply with standards set out within the tender.
• 6. Who are the key users of the supporting platform?: The key users are primary school teachers and pupils. The programme will be accessed and led by class teachers and displayed via whiteboard to whole class. It is hoped that pupils will also be able to access a 'zone' on the website/platform individually upon completion of the classroom based programme - with info, activities and games to consolidate learning - but they will not be individually accessing the main programme that is designed for whole class learning.
• 7. Will primary school children be using the platform?: The key users are primary school teachers and pupils. The programme will be accessed and led by class teachers and displayed via whiteboard to whole class.
• 8. What outcome measures are currently in use that are required to be integrated?: We currently use standardised measures of Child Outcome Rating Scale (CORS) and Me & My Feelings (MMF) plus a bespoke measure of knowledge - and a qualitative feedback form. Children complete these individually - but they are analysed together as a class - so we would need to consider with digital experts the best way of facilitating this.