Healthcare Bid Writing – Why Thornton & Lowe are industry experts!

Healthcare Bid Writing - Increasingly Competitive Bids

In the healthcare sector, there is a huge range of contract and framework opportunities. From domiciliary care through to various clinical contracts, such as sexual health, GP services and phlebotomy. There are also plenty of non-clinical services, known as “health adjacent services” available, such as recruitment, consulting, administration and catering. Securing these contracts and frameworks means that you need to enter a competitive bidding process, which requires time, planning and healthcare bid writing expertise!

For NHS health care services in England take a look at our overview of the Provider Selection Regime.

Bid Writing for Healthcare Tenders

Quite often, when completing a bid, you need juggle your day to day commitments in your healthcare business, around writing and submitting a strong bid. At times, it can be complicated and a tricky path to navigate, often meaning the bid gets put off until the last minute. The result – the bid is poorly written and is unsuccessful.

Being successful with a bid involves a number of critical elements, such as:

• Having a robust pipeline
• Pre-bid work, including assessing your competitors
• A robust bid/no bid process, ensuring you select only the bids you have a chance of wining
• Structuring and storyboarding the bid
• Developing realistic win themes
• Clear and concise writing
• Use of evidence
• Time and tender management.

In most cases, when companies write a bid, they focus on simply writing answers to the questions, submitting the bid and hoping for the best.

Why Thornton & Lowe are experts in healthcare bid and tender submissions

We’ve been successfully writing healthcare bids for our clients since 2009. These have included a wide range of healthcare bids, for buyers including Local Authorities, Integrated Care Boards, NHS Trusts and the Prison Service. These have included small companies wanting to provide domiciliary care services, recruitment companies, equipment providers, through to hospitals, NHS Trusts, GP practices and dental surgeries.

We’ve worked on bids for:

Our social housing bid writing often overlaps with NHS and healthcare tender requirements.

Healthcare Bid Writing - Experience and Volume of Tenders

At the time of writing (May 2024), this year we have completed and submitted 42 healthcare bids. That’s 2 a week, with no signs of slowing down. Our success rates are consistently over 75%.

90% of these healthcare bids are into the UK public sector, tendering to secure government contracts online.

If you want to win NHS tenders you need to ensure you are prepared with your carbon reduction plan and Evergreen Assessments.

Our Healthcare Bid Writing Services

As bid consultants, we are more than just bid writers – we guide our clients through the whole process. We work closely with our clients to ensure firstly that they are going for the right bids and secondly, that they have the best chance of being successful with the actual bid.

Working closely with our clients we research the bid to understand the buyer and who is the incumbent, if there is one. We also complete competitor analysis to understand who are the main risks and also to help develop the bid’s win themes.

We will complete a thorough review of the bid to understand what is needed to fully answer the needs of the buyer and to demonstrate value. When it comes to bid writing, it is more than simply answering questions. It is about fully addressing the needs of the buyer. Linking to this is how share our industry knowledge with our clients.

For example, it could be how the service being tendered for could reduce unnecessary hospitalisations or waiting times. It could be about improving access, facilitating choice or reducing health inequalities. Or it could be the focus on reablement and independence. It could also be thinking wider than just the buying organisation and consider service users, carers, family members and advocates. Or it could be helping our clients secure a place on NHS Supply Chain.

We have a team of 20 directly employed bid professionals, including Bid Managers, Bid Writers and Bid Co-ordinators, all of whom have experience being involved in healthcare bids. It is this combined knowledge that allows us to fully support and help our healthcare sector clients.

Healthcare Bid Writing Training

And it’s not just bid writing support we offer our clients. We also provide bid writing training courses to the healthcare sector. Our bid training course are deliberately aimed at any level of experience and for anyone involved in bidding for healthcare contracts and/or Frameworks. Our bid training will help you to get the edge needed to stand out in a competitive market.

We provide CPD accredited Bid Writing training that covers bid writing as well as bid strategy and bid processes. We also provide bespoke bid training courses that are built and tailored around a company’s needs. This could be focussing purely on improving their writing or it could be looking in to and developing their bid processes. Or, it could be a combination of both.

Domiciliary care bid writing training is of growing importance as demand for the services continue to grow.

Healthcare Bid Writing Testimonials

“ We are extremely happy with the service and Thornton & Lowe’s support has allowed us to grow considerably over the last 4 years, with goals to double in size during the course of 2023/2024 through a number of important NHS tenders.”

Alix Ripley, Sales Director, Newcross Healthcare

“I was on the 2-day bid writing masterclass. I have around a year and a half of experience in bid writing, and I found the course informative, engaging and held a lot of interesting and insightful points. Charles is a great tutor! The course didn't feel stuffy at all, I left with a lot of good documents and processes I can implement going forward (and the food was great). Thanks Charles!”

Jade Macdonald, Trainee Bid Writer, Human Support Group

“Absolutely outstanding service, always willing to go the extra mile for any queries we may have. A pleasure to work with.”

Aliciya Rabu, Registered Manager, Pova Care