Sheffield Well-Being Consortium:

Invitation to Tender

For Community Health Champions

Introduction

The Well-Being Consortium has secured a contract through Sheffield City Council to establish, maintain and support a participant led network that empowers volunteer ‘Community Health Champions’, recruited from Sheffield’s most deprived neighbourhoods, to improve the health and well-being of their communities.

Community Health Champions are:

  • Volunteers
  • Recruited from Sheffield’s least healthy communities
  • Passionate about improving the health of their communities
  • People with the skills and understanding of health and community engagement they need to make a positive difference

Community Health Champions are perceived as being central to achieving the ambition of reducing health inequalities within the city. Effective community empowerment is a key part of this, harnessing the understanding, energy, skills and commitment of local people to both improve their own health and to engage their wider community. See Appendix 1 for a description of the potential roles of Community Health Champions.

The official start date for the contract is 3 November 2008 and it is scheduled to conclude at the end of September 2011.

This document represents an Invitation to Tender for the consortium members to delivery services against the contract.

What services need to be delivered?

We need consortium members to recruit (though see point below), support and develop Community Health Champions and enable them to participate in a Health Champions Network.

The Champions will need to come from and work within the Enhanced Public Health Programme areas in the city. See Appendix 2 for a list of these areas.

Although it is anticipated that providers will need to have the capacity to recruit new volunteers from the community who can operate as Health Champions,the thrust of the work (especially in the first phase of the contract) will be on supporting and developing existing volunteers to join theHealth ChampionsNetwork, as there are now over 700 people in Sheffield who have completed the Introduction to Community Development and Health course (managed by NHS Sheffield), with 100 more people due to graduate from the course each year for the next three years, and who constitute a pool of potential Health Champions who can be recruited into the Network. The primary reason a Network of Health Champions is being developed is to provide an on-going support mechanism for these volunteers, enabling them to develop further and increase the impact of their work within communities.

The Network will fulfil a number of functions, including:

Providing a peer/mutual support mechanism for the Health Champions, and so encouraging retention and continuous improvement

Encouraging Health Champions to exchange best practice and to develop shared approaches to tackling issues at a community level

Enabling Health Champions to have a voice and to influence and feed into key strategies, policy developments and practical initiatives within the community health field

The responsibility for developing and servicing the Network, and within that ensuring that it can mature into a sustainable, participant-led body, will be the Well-Being Consortium’s, through its central management capacity.[1] This will represent a complementary division of functions, with Network support and co-ordination provided through the consortium’s central capacity dovetailing with practical support provided to Champions by consortium members to enable them to undertake their day-to-day frontline roles within the community.

Specification of the support role

The role of providers in supporting Health Champions will consist of the following:

Where appropriate, recruiting local people to be volunteer Health Champions (though see point above about the thrust of the support role, especially in the first phase of the project)

Assessing the volunteers’ capacity to meet certain competencies that will define what a Health Champion should be able to do

Working with the volunteer Champions to agree anindividually tailoredPersonal Development Plan

Enabling the Champions to identify theirpotential role in improving the health of the community

Signposting the Champions to relevant training and development opportunities (the organisation of training, along with the training budget, will be centrally co-ordinated by theconsortium)

Providing regular follow-on support and supervision to ensure that the Championsare fulfilling their potential and maximising the impact that they are having in improving the health of the community

Supporting the Champions, where appropriate, to access employment in line withtheir personal development strategies, including signposting them to appropriate vocational opportunities

The commissioned services will need to commence from the beginning of January 2009.

What targets do we need to deliver?

Outputs

Over the full project period (November 2008 to September 2011) we need to:

Recruit 180 volunteer Community Health Champions into the Network, with recruitment being targeting at the communities in Sheffield with the poorest health

Help these Champions to identify their potential contribution

Build their skills (most probably through encouraging them to engage in the Introduction to Community Development and Health Programme)[2]

Support them to follow through and deliver community activities

Hold at least 3 Community Health Champion Network events (attended by a minimum of 500 people)

Outcomes

Over the full project period the outcomes we need to achieve are:

At least 2,700 people supported by Champions to live healthier lives (this works out as a ratio of 15 people supported for every Champion)

At least 70 (39%) of the Champions access paid employment

See Appendix 3 for the impacts that the project will be trying to bring about.

We are inviting consortium member organisations who have already expressed interest to tender to deliver services against this contract.

Our approach to sub-contracting will be in two waves or phases. In this, the first phase, we intend to sub-contract for Health Champions’ support activities between January and September 2009. Towards the end of that period, there will be a second phase of sub-contracting, covering the remainder of the contract period, i.e. October 2009 to September 2011. This approach is summarised in the table below:

Phase / When will sub-contracts be negotiated / For what period
Phase 1 / Nov/Dec 2008 / Jan to Sept 2009
Phase 2 / July/Aug/Sep 2009 / Oct 2009 to Sept 2011

We have organised our approach into 2 distinct phases primarily so that we can:

‘Hit the ground running’ in the early period, bringing Health Champions on stream quickly and getting the Network off the ground, deploying consortium members that have existing skills and experience in this area of community development and health

Use the first phase to identify gaps in provision and within the consortium provider base

Explore ways that other consortium members can build their capacity and develop their ways of working so that they are in a position to secure a contract in the second phase of the project, and in this way plug the identified gaps in provision

Explore approaches to Health Champion recruitment, support, development and deployment that are imaginative and non-conventional, with a view to commissioning such approaches in the second phaseof the project

This phased approach has been agreed with the commissioning body, Sheffield City Council.

In this first phase of the project we aim to commission support for a total of 75 Health Champions and are inviting individual organisations to tender for a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 Champions supported during that period.

Tender Price

The Health Champions support package has been unit priced at £1,000 per Champion (please note that this is a fixed price). The indicative breakdown of this unit price is profiled as follows:

Recruitment£50

Personal Development Plan£50

CRB Check£35

Volunteer expenses £195 (26 weeks @ £7.50)

Support & supervision £520 (26 hours [1 hour per week] @ £20)

Contribution to overheads £150 (@ 15%)

Total £1,000

Tender evaluation criteria

In this first phase of the project (Jan to Sep 2009) sub-contractors will need to be able to demonstrate that they meet the following criteria:

1. An established track record in delivering community health projects

2. Capacity to ‘hit the ground running’, supporting Champions to deliver early impacts within their communities

Sub-criteria:

2a. Capacity to achieve at the least the minimum target of supporting 10 Health Champions over the period

2b. An established track record of recruiting and developing Health Champions or volunteers in equivalent or similar roles

2c. Health Champions’ recruitment and support systems already in place

2d. Location within an Enhanced Public Health Programme (EPHP) area within the city

2e. Good links already in place to local community networks, organisations and groups within that EPHP area

3. Capacity to link Health Champions into wider neighbourhood renewal issues and initiatives

4. Effective Quality Assurance systems and practices in place

5. Effective Monitoring & Information Management systems and practices in place

We recognise that some of these criteria may be difficult to fulfil for some of the consortium members who originally expressed interest in delivering against the contract. However, as already indicated, we have divided the project into 2 distinct phases so that we can generate quick wins and early impacts within the designated EPHP areas, at the same time as analysing gaps and addressing capacity issues so that additional providers, deploying innovative approaches, can be brought into the Health Champions provider network later next year.

Even if you think that you don’t meet all of the stated criteria, but feel you have a role to play in delivering the contract, please complete and return the Submission Template (see below), as this will give us critical information for helping to design patterns of provision in the future.

Submission Process

Please complete the Submission Template set out in Appendix 4 and return it in hard copy to:

John Goodwin

Health Co-ordinator

Manor & Castle Healthy Living Network

Manor & Castle Development Trust Ltd

Norfolk House

Stafford Lane

Sheffield

S2 5HR

The deadline for the return of submissions is Friday 21 November 2008.

For further information on this Invitation to Tender, please contact Neil Coulson at (tel 01246 417725)

Appendix 1: Description of the roles of Community Health Champions

The primary roles of the Community Health Champion are to:

Help improve the health and well-being of people in Sheffield’s least healthy communities

Empower people to eat healthily, be physically active and improve their mental well-being

Community Health Champions will help people to live healthier lives by:

Promoting positive health messages

Stimulating healthy behaviour change

Supporting people in making healthy choices

They will also help make their community a healthier place by:

Helping to identify the health needs of their communities

Identifying how those needs can be better met

Being involved in civic participation related activities, e.g. local community forums and panels, elected member development activities, regional and national community involvement opportunities

Examples of the activities Community Health Champions may deliver include:

Helping people to live healthier lives by:

Providing informed support to their families and friends

Promoting health messages to the people, groups and organisations they are involved with

Delivering brief interventions to support people from their communities in making health choices

Organising activities that provide people with the skills and knowledge to live healthier lives

Providing peer support to people to help them make and maintain healthy choices

Helping to make their community a healthier place by:

Helping to find out about the health challenges their community faces

Helping to develop the Enhanced Public Health Programme for their community

Working with services to help them develop effective solutions to their communities health need

Appendix 2: Enhanced Public Health Programme areas

  1. Sharrow and Highfield
  2. Burngreave
  3. Wybourn
  4. Netherthorpe, Upperthorpe & Langsett
  5. Manor, Woodthorpe & Park Hill
  6. Broomhall
  7. City Centre
  8. WinnGardens
  9. Southey
  10. Lowedges, Batemoor & Jordanthorpe
  11. Darnall, Tinsley & Acres Hill
  12. Arbourthorne & NorfolkPark
  13. GleadlessValley & Hemsworth
  14. Flower, Stubbin/Brushes & Shiregreen
  15. High Green
  16. Scowerdons

Appendix 3: Impacts

The project will need to make a demonstrable contribution to achieving the following outcomes in Sheffield:

1. Inequalities in health reduce

2. People have improved levels of self efficacy and social capital

3. People are empowered to improve their own health and that of their family, friends and wider community

4. People who previously had low levels of physical activity are more physically active in their daily lives

5. People have improved mental well-being

6. Children, parents and the wider community eat more healthily

7. More people are able to access education, training and employment

Appendix 4: Submission Template

Organisation Name:______

Contact person:______

Position in organisation: ______

Email address:______

Tel no:______

Please try and ensure your responses are concise and reflect the stated tender evaluation criteria. Please answer all the questions.

1. Please complete the following outputs/outcomes table overleaf

1

SWBC: ITT/Community Health Champions (NC/4 Nov 08)

Period / Number of Community Health Champions to be recruited, developed and supported (total min 10, total max 20) / No. of people supported by Community Health Champions to live healthier lives / Number of Community Health Champions securing paid employment
Quarter 1 – Jan to Mar 09
Quarter 2 – Apr to Jun 09
Quarter 3 – Jul to Sep 09
Total

1

SWBC: ITT/Community Health Champions (NC/4 Nov 08)

  1. Please describe any other added value outputs/outcomes that will be generated

3. Please describe briefly your organisation’s track record in delivering community health projects

  1. Please demonstrate how you will have the capacity to ‘hit the ground running’, supporting Champions to deliver early impacts within their communities

5. How will you link Health Champions into wider neighbourhood renewal issues and initiatives?

6. Please provide a brief summary of your Quality Assurance systems and practices (including listing any external kite marks you possess or are working towards)

7. Please provide a brief overview of your approach to Monitoring & Information Management

8. Is there anything else you would like to say in support of your submission?

Signed ______

Date ______

1

SWBC: ITT/Community Health Champions (NC/4 Nov 08)

[1] A dedicated Project Co-ordinator will be recruited for this purpose.

[2]£80k is ring-fenced within the contract funding for training