NHS wins the Public Procurement Project of the Year with Blake Morgan’s support

Blake Morgan have showed the strength of their Public Procurement team by helping the NHS scoop a major honour.

On 16 September, NHS England and NHS Improvement and TWS Partners – supported by Blake Morgan, won the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply’s (CIPS) 2020 Public Procurement Project of the Year award for their work in developing an innovative long term programme to eliminate Hepatitis C in the UK.

The CIPS Supply Management Awards, in its 20th year, celebrates ‘excellence in procurement’, which encompasses, rewards, and honours the entire procurement and supply chain profession.

Blake Morgan was the legal advisor on all key aspects of the project, including planning and designing the procurement, the contractual work to support the procurement itself, and litigation advice on challenges to the process.

The Blake Morgan team included Chairman Bruce Potter, partners Simon McCann and Penri Desscan, consultant Emyr Lewis while partner Jo Thompson led on the litigation advice.  The team worked with specialist procurement strategy firm TWS Partners and the Commercial Medicines Directorate at NHS England.

The programme used market leading incentive structures and elimination projects to target hard to reach patient groups and help achieve the aim of eliminating Hepatitis C, which affects an estimated 215,000 people in the UK. As well as planning the development of the procurement process the project also had to withstand a major litigation challenge before the project could be finally launched.

Bruce Potter said: “I’m delighted that such an important project, which can help so many patients, has been recognised for its innovation and ambition.

“The aim is to eliminate Hepatitis C in the UK ahead of the WHO (World Health Organisation) target of 2030 and this procurement will be a vital step to achieving that goal.”

This ‘world-class’ and ‘first-of-its-kind’ project will help England in its ambition to become the first country in the world to eliminate the deadly disease. It was judged that in ‘breaking existing paradigms in a bid to eliminate one of the deadliest diseases in the world’, the team fully deserved the award.

The achievement is further highlighted by the quality of the competition, which included projects involving the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office  (formerly the Department for International Development), the Home Office, JSC “Ukrainian Railways”, the Ministry of Defence, NHS England and NHS Arden & GEM CSU and South Gloucestershire Council in the Public Procurement Project category.

Sebastian Moritz the leader of the TWS Partners team, said: “It was a long and tough project but in the end, I think we all had the feeling that we had achieved something great. This award is a symbol of the fact that it wasn’t just a feeling. Once again, congratulations to everyone involved.”