Case Study

CAREMARK NORTH HERTS & STEVENAGE NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex Domiciliary Care AQP

Tender Overview

In-Home Carers Limited — trading as Caremark North Herts & Stevenage — was awarded a position on the NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex Domiciliary Care Any Qualified Provider list on 9 March 2026. AssuredBID took responsibility for putting together and submitting their application.

The HWE Domiciliary Care AQP is a procurement run by NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Board. It operates under the Provider Selection Regime, which replaced the previous rules governing how NHS organisations buy care services in England. Under an AQP arrangement, the ICB does not select one provider over others. It sets out what an acceptable provider looks like, and every organisation that satisfies those requirements gets a place. Once on the list, providers become available for referrals from commissioners and individuals arranging their own NHS-funded care.

Because there is no head-to-head competition, the application is the whole story. It has to hold up on its own terms across every area the ICB has defined. One weak section is enough to end the process. In-Home Carers Limited brought us in to make sure that did not happen.

The award was confirmed on 9 March 2026. Their contract went live on 1 April 2026.

The Brief


Client	In-Home Carers Limited (trading as Caremark North Herts & Stevenage)
Commissioner	NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Board
Tender	NHS HWE Domiciliary Care Any Qualified Provider (AQP) 2025 Procurement
Procurement Route	Any Qualified Provider under the Provider Selection Regime
Contract Start	1 April 2026
Result	Successful — Contract Awarded 9 March 2026

In-Home Carers Limited is a domiciliary care business operating in North Hertfordshire and Stevenage under the Caremark franchise. They deliver personal care and support to adults in their own homes and came to us with a clear commercial objective — to add NHS commissioning to their work and become an approved provider for ICB-funded care packages in their local area.

The application required them to satisfy the ICB across multiple categories at the same time. Financial health, regulatory standing, organisational governance, workforce management, and operational delivery all featured. The ICB assessed each area independently and required a satisfactory response across every one of them. There was no aggregate score that could carry a borderline answer through.

Key Challenges

Challenge	Detail
Presenting a franchise operation as a locally accountable NHS provider	In-Home Carers Limited operates within the Caremark franchise structure, which means some of their systems, training frameworks, and quality standards are set at franchise level rather than developed in-house. An NHS commissioner needs to understand what the local business specifically delivers, how it is governed day to day, and who is directly accountable for care quality at the point of delivery. Presenting In-Home Carers Limited in a way that made that local accountability clear — rather than defaulting to franchise-level language — required careful thought about how the application was structured.
Converting local reputation into formal evidence	In-Home Carers Limited has an established track record in North Hertfordshire and Stevenage. That history is a genuine asset, but an AQP application does not reward reputation on its own. The ICB needs documented, properly referenced evidence — not a description of how long a provider has been operating or how well regarded they are locally. The task was turning what In-Home Carers Limited genuinely does well into the kind of substantiated responses that give an NHS commissioner a formal basis for approval.
Managing the CarePulse submission alongside day-to-day operations	The application was submitted through CarePulse, the NHS eProcurement portal used for this procurement. A full set of supporting documents — insurance, CQC registration, policies, financial records — had to be gathered, checked, formatted correctly, and uploaded against the right sections of the application before the portal closed. For a care business running live operations at the same time, coordinating all of that without anything slipping required careful management from our side.

Our Approach

AssuredBID handled the application from start to finish — initial assessment, all written content, evidence pack coordination, and portal submission.

Approach	Detail
Separating what is local from what is franchise	The first thing we did was establish a clear picture of what In-Home Carers Limited owns and controls locally versus what sits at the Caremark franchise level. That distinction shaped everything that followed. NHS commissioners expect to be approving a specific, locally accountable organisation — not a franchise brand. We built the application around In-Home Carers Limited as that organisation: their local governance arrangements, their local management team, and their local delivery model in North Hertfordshire and Stevenage.
Responses written for the territory, not the brand	Every written section was grounded in what In-Home Carers Limited actually does in their operating area. The governance section reflected how the business is overseen and managed locally. The workforce section described how their team is recruited, trained, and supervised on the ground. The service delivery section set out how care packages are planned and managed within the North Hertfordshire and Stevenage geography. The application read as a submission from a locally run provider, not a franchise template submitted under a different name.
Tracking every document to the deadline	We took ownership of the supporting evidence pack and monitored every item on the list. Insurance schedules, CQC documentation, safeguarding policies, financial records — each one was checked for currency and format well before the submission date. Where anything needed updating, we flagged it early enough to give In-Home Carers Limited time to deal with it without it becoming a last-minute problem.

Results

NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex confirmed the award to In-Home Carers Limited on 9 March 2026. The statutory standstill period concluded without challenge, and the contract was issued for signature ahead of the 1 April 2026 start date.

Application	Result
NHS HWE Domiciliary Care AQP 2025 Procurement	✅ SUCCESSFUL

What This Means for Vow Care Services

Getting onto the HWE AQP opens a category of work that In-Home Carers Limited was not previously able to access through NHS commissioning routes. The HWE ICB area covers a substantial part of the East of England, and being on the approved list means In-Home Carers Limited is now visible to commissioners arranging NHS-funded domiciliary care packages within that geography — including in the North Hertfordshire and Stevenage area where they already have an established operational base.

The approval also gives them something that carries forward. NHS commissioners independently verify a provider’s governance, financial standing, and delivery capability before granting approval. Having gone through that process and come out the other side with a contract in hand is a formal, documented endorsement of how In-Home Carers Limited operates. That endorsement is relevant to every commissioner relationship and every procurement opportunity they pursue from this point on.

As they build their NHS delivery record from April 2026, the quality of what they do on the ground will determine how much referral work comes their way. They now have the contract. The work is to make the most of it.

Working with AssuredBID

Procurement decisions in health and social care are made on paper. A commissioner reading your application has no visibility of your care staff, your client relationships, or the standard of your day-to-day delivery. What they have is a written submission — and that submission has to give them every reason to say yes and no reason to say no.

AssuredBID is a health and social care bid writing consultancy. We work with care providers of all sizes — independent operators, franchise businesses, and larger group providers — helping them get onto NHS contracts, local authority frameworks, and approved provider lists across England.

Our team understands how procurement works under the Provider Selection Regime and across the full range of commissioning routes used in the care sector. We know what different commissioners prioritise, how to put together a submission that holds up under evaluation, and how to present a provider’s delivery experience in a way that lands with an NHS or local authority audience.

If you are preparing for a tender, tracking an upcoming framework, or simply want to understand what it would take to get your organisation onto a contract you have had your eye on, talk to the AssuredBID team.

Visit www.assuredbid.co.uk or call us to speak to a bid writer directly.

Find the right contracts, get tender alerts instantly, and submit your bids — all in one place. Access now