Patient Transport & Emergency Ambulance Bid Writing | Win NHS contracts

Our guide to winning bids for NEPTS, A&E Blue Light Support, and Secure Patient Transfers.

Here at Tsaks Consulting UK, our bid writers across the UK, led by our Director, Jason Cooney, have helped ambulance and patient transfer service providers win contracts for both Non Emergency NEPTS services emergency and A&E support services.

Our team will help you:

• Find contract opportunities including DPS and Framework opportunities
• Write your tender or bid
• Create supporting documentation and submit your bid.
• Win more contracts!

Part 1: Winning NEPTS and Patient Transport bids

This is a high volume, highly competitive sector with the NHS spending over 500 Million annually on Non-Patient Emergency Transport Services as well as additional funds allocation to private ambulance support. The contracts are generally highly competitive, and we have helped small and medium providers retain existing contracts, as well as large national operators expand market share. Our team achieved a 90% win rate in 2025 through implementing key strategies. Strategies ambulance and patient transport service providers can implement to win more contracts and bids include focusing on and detailing:

• Your efficiency levels and scheduling capabilities. You need to demonstrate your back-end scheduling capabilities and any innovative technology.
• Your registration and compliance (and continued compliance) with CQC requirements and quality control procedures you have in place. This includes providing practical examples within your existing (and proposed) operations of how you meet the five key CQC domains (safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led).
• Your commitment to patient experience and how these extends in practice in your day to day operations.
• Your ability to deliver exceptional service and operations. You need to focus on value-added services and what you do that is innovative.
• Your understanding of all relevant legislation and ability to keep abreast of any legislative changes.
• How your systems and processes ensure you comply with NICE and NHS protect guidelines, and your track record and experience in protecting vulnerable patients during transit. Use images of your equipment, quotes and testimonials from your personnel, and documentary evidence of your systems and processes to evidence your capabilities.
• ISO 9001 Certification and how you actually implement, and continuously improve your quality control procedures.
• Cover the full range of services such as planned care and discharge services.

Being selected as the ‘Most Suitable Provider’ in 2026 for NEPTS Contracts

The recent changes to the procurement act in 2023 and the Provider Selection Regime mean that when writing a winning bid or tender, you need to go beyond meeting the specifications. You need to show that you have exceeded the requirements and are deeply integrated, or have an approach to ensure deep integration with Integrated Care Boards (ICBs).

You need to excel in all the qualitative requirements in order to be appointed ‘Most Suitable Provider’. This is different to the old system and incorporates increased competition particularly with demonstrating a patient focused and outcomes based approach. The most suitable provider is not necessarily the cheapest, nor the one with the most modern fleet. It’s the provider that most comprehensively covers all aspects of the questions and exceeds requirements and expectations resulting in a winning overall score.

Ensure you pass the NHS Net Zero Supplier Roadmap (Green Fleet Mandate) to win

Our expert bid writers will help you write your bid for any NEPTS and Patient Transport contract across the UK. Whether it’s services in London, Birmingham or even Leeds, or across regional areas in the UK, we will help ensure you submit a quality bid. With the New Zero supplier roadmap now becoming a dealbreaker in 2026, you will also need to develop a credible Carbon Reduction Plan which covers Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Our writers will help you with this and understand what you need to cover off.

For example, for an existing fleet, your CRP will need to cover key details such as:

• Your proposed transition to Electric Vehicles and zero-emission patient transport vehicles (PTVs) including a credible timeline and specific milestones and deadlines for the transition to occur.
• How response times and range will be maintained throughout and as a result of the transitions.
• Quality assurance processes in place to ensure that for critical services (such as critical dialysis or oncology appointments) you continue to provide a prompt and reliable service regardless of any chance in fleet or equipment.

A high scoring response for social value when writing NEPTS and Patient Transport bids

Our team has strong experience writing responses to Social Value questions for a variety of healthcare bids to the NHS and the healthcare sector. With the 2025 Social Value Model, a minimum of 10% of the weighting criteria is focused on social value. Given the competitiveness of patient transport bids, in our experience, this can be the difference between wining and losing the contract, and it doesn’t have anything directly to do with your operations. In order to write  winning response our expert writers here at Tsaks consulting recommend you:

• Put forward measurable and actionable initiatives that are realistic.
• Put forward plans based on research and evidence about how you will reach Core20PLUS5 population groups.
• Put forward training plans and initiatives to upskill local apprentices and ex-armed forces personnel with driving skills and caring skills.
• Work with local training and recruitment providers to show how many roles you intend to employ and over what time period.
• Look at providing our fleet for use to local charities outside of working or usage hours to benefit the community.
• Identify scope in the community where you can share your skills and your personnel can share their driving and patient transport experience with the community.

Section 2: Writing winning Emergency (A&E) and Blue Light Ambulance bids

Our bid writers will help you write the compelling, detailed, comprehensive and concise bid you need to win highly competitive emergency services bids. Compliance is key, as is putting forward a detailed response that exudes credibility. You need to clearly demonstrate in your bid or submission that your solution will ensure lead times are minimised and patient outcomes are optimised.

We understand that Private Ambulance Partners need to do to function as an extension of the NHS’s Emergency Operations Centers and your integration with, and ability to seamlessly operate as an extension of their teams is absolutely critical. Our team or writers has helped providers bid for the broad range of services including A&E support, surge capacity and blue light response bids. We have helped providers bid for an win multiple lots in contracts including bids to provide:

• Double crewed ambulances: Where in addition to having the right vehicle specs, equipment and maintenance programs in place, your resourcing and staff management are also critical as are your human resource management processes.
• High Dependency (HDU) & Critical care transfers: Speed, safety and efficiency are critical here and a focus on your geographic location relevant to the different tertiary centers is critical. You also need to demonstrate capability to manage ICU-level patients.
• Surge and major incident response: This is all about scalability. You need a robust, detailed and credible plan in place to demonstrate how you can assist during peak times.

Demonstrating the expertise and capability of your staff and clinical governance process

To write a winning emergency services bid for ambulance services you need to put forward a qualified, experienced team and demonstrate you have the right clinical governance processes in place. Continuous training and a process for ensuring all your personnel’s licenses and qualifications are current is also critical. In you need to:

• List and provide evidence of your personnel’s credentials and qualifications. This applies to all team members including paramedics, back-office staff and and EMT personnel.
• List and detail your CPD program for the year and coming years.
• Detail any ERDT training undertaken as well as the safety records of each of your proposed drivers.
• Put forward a training program for any new personnel.
• Demonstrate the range of skills across your proposed teams. It’s important that to provide a cost efficient service, that delivers excellent patient safety outcomes, you have the right mix of expertise (paramedics etc). This is critical to showing your team composition is correct and also that you can handle surges in demand.
• Show your recruitment and screening processes are robust and compliant. Provide actual proof of how you undertake and ensure you undertake DBS checks as well as Fit and Proper Person checks. Providing evidence (documentary) of your compliance processes is critical as it gives your bid credibility.

Proving exceptional operational performance in order to win

Our bid and tender writers help A&E and Blue Light ambulance service providers write winning bids by putting forward a compelling and persuasive response to operational performance requirements. Performance Data is absolutely critical and generating outstanding performance data will largely be based on your ability to create and implement a detailed, concise and effective service delivery plan. This gives the procurement team and reviewers the confidence that you will meet the critical (life and death) requirements of Category 1 through to 4 response times.

Our winning bid writers will help you score well by detailing your:

• Dispatch systems: Provide screenshots and demonstrations about how our dispatch systems integrate with Computer Aided Dispatch and how you track your vehicle in real time. Also focus on your key personnel that manage these systems and their training.

• Contingency planning: Including our Plan B and contingencies for a range of different scenarios such as bad weather, unforseen staff absences, issues with fuel, unforseen vehicle issues, power outages and cyber issues or attacks and other contingencies requiring an operational ‘buffer’.

What organisations release tenders for Third Party Private Providers

Our team of bid writers have helped private providers respond to ITTs, DPSs, Frameworks and RFPs from a variety of providers including:

• London Ambulance Service (LAS)

• North West Ambulance Service (NWAS)

• South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb)

• West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS)

• East of England Ambulance Service (EEAST)

A broad range of Integrated Care Boards who have taken over NEPTS contracts and we have written bids to many of them including:

• NHS Greater Manchester ICB
• NHS North East London ICB

Frameworks and Dynamic Purchasing Systems such as:

• NHS North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative (NOE CPC)

• NHS London Procurement Partnership (LPP)

• Crown Commercial Service (CCS)

At Tsaks Consulting UK our successful track record includes writing bids for:

1. Greater London Mental Health (Secure): This was a bid for the transport of vulnerable patients between acute wards and PICU units. It was quite specialised and we worked with our client to focus on their team of registered mental health nurses as well as the ligature-free vehicles in their fleet. We also helped them score well by integrating specific mental health transport processes into all of their procedures and documentation ensuring the procurement teams understood they had the mental health transport specific experience and procedures to deliver on the contract.
2. Manchester / NW High Dependency (HDU) Contract: We helped a service provider bid for the contract in Manchester which involved hospital to hospital transfers for critically ill patients. The patients had highly demanding requirements, such as continuous oxygen and monitoring. We helped our client demonstrate their understanding of Manchester and the different hospitals, that they had the team with the right expertise and qualifications to deliver the service, and a robust processes for ensuring they could meet any surge in demand.
3. Birmingham / Midlands 999 surge support: We helped our client secure this contract which required them to meet Category 1 and 2 response times and become an integral regional trust partner. We focused on on their equipment, personnel, and critically their systems and processes for meeting surges in demand and providing support. Our writers helped our client a detailed operational plan that was credible and realistic.
4. Yorkshire / Leeds Bariatric NEPTS: We helped our client secure an NEPTS contract. A key part of this win was a robust social value response that scored exceptionally well and was a differentiating factor compared to their competitors. They had a number of close competitors with similar service offerings.

Contact our team of bid writers today for assistance with your next bid. Jason, our Director, leads our teams of experienced bid and tender writers and we provide a round-the-clock service to businesses across the UK to help you win.