The must-read stories and debate in health policy and leadership.

HSJ revealed yesterday that NHS England has awarded Palantir a new £25m contract to “transition” its existing NHS projects into the new federated data platform, a £480m deal expected to be announced soon.

The 12-month deal was awarded without an open tender process. NHSE said that while it was not an open process, it was a “compliant tender process”.

Regardless of the legal compliance, to strike this deal with the huge FDP deal at such a critical stage – a winner could be announced as soon as September and Palantir are frontrunner – the optics are not great.

The move only goes to further the existing perception that NHSE is giving Palantir a “timely leg up” towards landing the FDP.

And this is not just among campaigners with philosophical objections but also among their more agnostic managerial counterparts with the NHS itself.

Read more about the deal and what it means here

In the balance

Integrated care chiefs are holding last-ditch talks over the future of a trust that was supposed to hold a “landmark” integrated care contract worth £360m, HSJ learned this week, after efforts to merge it with other organisations failed.

Dudley Integrated Health and Care Trust has been beset by difficulties almost since its 2020 inception, when it was established as part of plans for a single primary and community services provider across Black Country Integrated Care System. 

NHSE had backed the concept of a new form of integrated care provider and designed a new type of contract which the trust was due to hold.

But in 2021, NHSE rejected the business case for the full integrated care partnership model, as a review found “hostility” and “poor working relationships” between system partners had hampered the project.

Integrated care board leaders reviewed the contract and concluded DIHC was “too small to be a standalone NHS trust”, revealing in January they were exploring options for its future, including a possible merger.

Local chiefs now say this has not been possible, and they have launched a process to “look at the future of DIHC and the impact of any proposals on services and staff”.

Also on hsj.co.uk today

The chief executive of a large hospital trust in the South West has made a rare intervention to call for more housing for hospital staff, and a senior NHSE director has said the government should “relieve” GP practices of being the sole controller for their patients’ data.