How to respond to a skilled Nursing RFP!

Various companies across the US work with Government organizations across contiguous United States for providing nursing and medical resources to hospitals. Most of these companies are small businesses, veterans owned and women owned. They compete with larger organizations for Government orders to provide resources to Federal and State institutions.  

To win the RFP’s companies normally have an established strategy in place to ensure that they recruit, train and retain employees so that it benefits the clients and is of long-term advantage to the company. They have an established hiring plan that they use to fulfill the resourcing requirements. The hiring process followed is given below:

Hiring Fulfillment Plan

The hiring fulfillment plan that is followed by is a risk averse plan that ensures that all hiring requirements are fulfilled on time. The different steps followed in the process are defined below:

·         Requirements are analyzed in a meeting soon after receipt of the contract award letter. The meeting is attended by the Program coordinator, Admin Coordinator and lead recruiter. This is a general definition of roles.

·         Decisions are made to fulfill the requirements during the meeting. The Service Program Coordinator takes the opportunity to head the recruitment process.

·         The Recruitment team lead takes the responsibility of selecting the recruiters for the process.

·         Recruitment process starts by shortlisting the candidates from the available database of Registered Nurses. All relevant CV’s mapping for the requirements are shortlisted and placed in the recruitment solution software.

·         Once CV’s are shortlisted, recruiters discuss with the potential candidates and further shortlists the candidates. The recruitment team lead handles the first level of screening based upon the experience in serving medical candidates.

·         Once the CV’s are shortlisted, experts panel examines the candidates and create the final list.

·         There are 3 final CV’s for each post

·         The best candidate among the 3 candidates is sent to the recruitment board for each post for the final selection.

·         If the candidate is rejected by the examination board, the next 2 candidates are sent for the final recruitment. Most of the cases, companies are able to fulfill the requirements with the best candidate provided. Once the candidates are shortlisted, the contractual agreement is signed between the company and the client.

·         Once the final candidate is selected the final negotiations are made on salary/benefits and other aspects of the employment and release the offer letter to the candidate.

·         The candidate joins the department in the designated role and location within contiguous United States

·         Review of candidate performance every 3 months

·         Appraisal process for candidate every 1 year

The company should be able to meet the Acceptable Quality Level (AQL) on any performance measure. Failing to adhere to quality levels can result in deduction of billed amount as per the RFP clauses.  All quality conditions should be adhered to in the Government RFP response document. Most RFP’s also have clauses related to payments and acceptance.  In general conditions, the RFP documents require the contractor to accept the payment in full. If the contractor has any objections to any of the payment terms and conditions in the RFP document, they can raise it in the response. Most response documents have a clause that gives the option to raise objections to any clause in the RFP.

Another very important clause in most nursing RFP’s is related to tying-up with third-party service providers.  Most RFP’s require all contractors, subcontractors, and third-party service providers and associates working on a contract to the same level and process of background security investigations. In most cases the responsibility of verification is with the primary contractor.

As part of the response, contractors should also check the data clauses. The contractor’s resources will have access to client’s data which are sensitive and confidential. It is important for contractors to ensure that information should not be co-mingled, if possible, with any other data on the Contractors/subcontractor's information systems or media storage systems in order to ensure that client requirements related to data protection and media sanitization can be met.  Client as per RFP conditions reserves the right to conduct on-site inspections of Contractor and subcontractor IT resources to ensure data security controls, separation of data and job duties, and destruction/media sanitization procedures are in compliance with directive requirements.

 As a final check to the successful RFP response, before submission, the applicant must ensure that all Appendix as requested must be attached and signed. Transmittal letters, Executive summary and other mandatory requirements as per the RFP requirement should be adhered to. Failure to fulfill the requirements can lead to disqualification.

Developing a RFP response requires specific skillset that many companies do not have. Connect with us at info@intelligentq.co.in so that we can help you create a wining RFP response for any nursing and medical services RFP!