A pharma and diagnostics firm has dropped its bid to reverse a decision by three acute trusts to award a multimillion pound pathology contract to a competitor.
In April, Abbott Laboratories challenged the decision of a collaborative of Yorkshire trusts to award a £475m pathology managed services contract to Siemens. But it decided to drop the claim following a high court judge rejecting its application for an expedited hearing.
The judge ordered the company pay summarily assessed costs of £24,000 for the expedition application, but otherwise no other costs were awarded.
The company declined to comment on the decision to stop the challenge, and it is not clear what precipitated it. However, it means the collaborative of Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust, Calderdale and Huddersfield Foundation Trust and Mid Yorkshire Teaching Trust can press on with awarding the contract to Siemens.
Abbott’s challenge focused on the award of a 14-year contract, running to March 2037, to supply pathology services across the three trusts, including expanding “point of care testing in hospitals and primary care, and self-testing at home”.
The contract is part of the ongoing national efforts to amalgamate local pathology services across multiple trusts to drive greater productivity and cost savings through scale.
Abbott claimed in its initial challenge that the collaborative had “unlawfully invited and permitted” Siemens to “significantly change” the price in its bid.
The collaborative rejected these claims in their defence. “At no point had the Siemens tender appeared to the defendants to be abnormally low,” it said. It had re-run the evaluation process because it had found errors in the prices in both bids and so gave both Siemens and Abbott the chance to correct them.
This clarification process resulted in the price in Siemens bid going up while the price in Abbott’s went down, the collaborative added.
It said it had sent a letter to Abbott explaining the rationale for asking Siemens to amend the price in their bid and pointing out that the firm’s amended bid included a higher price as a result. But this reasoning was “ignored in the [Abbott] particulars of claim”.
Simon Worthington, Director of Finance at Leeds Teaching, said: “Throughout this challenge we were confident in the process we followed being robust and appropriate to ensure we achieved the best value for public money. We are now able to finalise the appointment of our preferred bidder and implement our new managed service contract for pathology”.
Source: HSJ
Date: 6 July