Cleaning services. 1.0 This Domestic & Support Services Contract provides the Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust with cleaning, hostess, portering and courier services across its various locations in Norfolk and Suffolk.

1.1 Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health services across the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.

The Trust has eight major sites with in-patients and several smaller sites from which Community Teams provide services in the community. Facilities services are currently managed from two core sites at Hellesdon on the outskirts of Norwich and St Clements in Ipswich.

1.2 The Domestic and Support Services Contract will provide the

Trust with a Hostess/meal, Portering/courier, and Domestic cleaning service. It is important to provide a high standard of healthy eating and clean buildings across the Trust so that patients and other service users have a clean, healthy, safe and infection free environment conducive to their recovery. It is also important that Trust staff have a clean working environment and visitors can see that the Trust is committed to high standards evidenced both through internal quality assurance monitoring and through the P.L.A.C.E. audits undertaken by the Trust with patient representatives as required annually by the governments Health and Social Care Information Centre.

1.3 The cleaning specification in this contract is based on NHS cleaning guidelines and the cleaning performance measured on the NHS standard of Cleanliness and any future NHS guidelines.

1.4 The hostess/meal services have been incorporated into the Domestic Contract to enable a more effective and flexible use of the workforce across the whole of the Trust.

1.5 By including the Portering and Courier services into the domestic contract it is intended that necessary transfer of documents and mail, pharmacy, stores and equipment is mainly carried out in a single coordinated schedule.

1.6 The Trusts objective in combining the four strands is to more effectively use resources and benefit from an improved overall performance and efficiency of services.

1.7 It is the responsibility of the Contractor to fulfil these aims, provide a well managed, well trained workforce committed to high levels of service using the most advanced and effective cleaning techniques to meet these objectives and to use the most effective and efficient model to deliver the services.