Never Miss an NHS, LA or DPS Opportunity
CareBids sends you social care tender alert notifications the moment a matching contract appears on any of the 14 UK procurement portals we monitor — filtered by your care type, location, and contract value before the alert reaches your inbox.
Why care providers miss tenders they were perfectly placed to win
Public sector care contracts do not wait. A local authority issues a domiciliary care framework notice on Contracts Finder at 9am on a Tuesday. Submissions close in 21 days. If you are not monitoring Contracts Finder — and most providers are not — you find out when a competitor mentions they won it.
The problem is structural. UK public procurement is spread across 14 separate portals, each with its own search interface, notification system, and publication schedule. Contracts Finder covers most English contracts above £12,000 (as required by the Procurement Act 2023, which replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Find a Tender Service covers above-threshold contracts. But NHS ICBs and trusts also publish on Jaggaer, ProContract, and their own standalone portals — portals that many smaller providers have never heard of.
We built CareBids because providers kept telling us the same thing: "We only found out about the contract after the deadline." That is not a resourcing problem. It's an information problem — and information problems are solvable.
How CareBids tender alerts work
We've built a monitoring pipeline that runs continuously — crawling, normalising, filtering, and delivering. Here is what happens between a contract being published and the alert reaching you.
Continuous portal crawling
CareBids runs dedicated crawlers for each of the 14 portals throughout the working day. Where portals provide a machine-readable API (such as the Find a Tender Service OCDS feed), we use it directly — giving us notice latencies measured in minutes rather than hours. Portals without APIs are crawled on structured schedules using authenticated sessions.
Normalisation and classification
Every notice is normalised into a standard schema: commissioner type, care category, service location, contract value, and submission deadline. The care category classification uses CPV codes alongside a care-sector keyword taxonomy we have built from CQC service type definitions — so 'personal care' is not confused with 'medical care' or 'equipment supply'.
Profile matching and eligibility pre-check
The normalised notice is matched against your provider profile: registered service types, CQC locations, geographic radius, and contract value range. If the notice passes, our Gatekeeper layer runs a binary eligibility check — flagging mandatory requirements such as ISO accreditations or minimum years of operation that your profile does not meet. Notices that fail are discarded. You never see them.
Alert delivery with tender summary
Matched, eligible notices trigger an email alert and an in-platform notification. The alert includes a CareBids tender summary — commissioner, care type, location, value, deadline, and your three-layer eligibility score — so you can decide in 30 seconds whether to open the full documents. No spreadsheets. No portal logins. No digging.
All 14 procurement portals, in one place
UK public sector care procurement is fragmented across a patchwork of eSourcing platforms, each used by different local authorities, NHS bodies, and devolved administrations. CareBids monitors all of them — so you do not have to choose between a comprehensive search and running your service.
A note on Find a Tender Service (FTS): Under the Procurement Act 2023 (which replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 on 24 February 2025), all UK contracting authorities must publish above-threshold notices on FTS. The Procurement Act 2023 also introduced new transparency notices — CareBids processes these automatically and surfaces them alongside standard contract notices in your alert feed. See our guide to DPS applications for more on how the new framework affects care sector procurement.
Filter down to the tenders that matter to your service
A high-volume alert feed with no filtering is as useless as no alerts at all. CareBids filters at four levels — so every notification represents a genuine opportunity.
Care type matching
Alerts are matched against your CQC registered service types — residential, domiciliary, supported living, children's homes, or nursing. You will not see a children's residential tender if you run a home care service.
Geography and travel radius
Set your catchment by postcode and radius (in miles). CareBids uses the postcodes.io API and Haversine distance calculation — the same method used by NHS commissioners — to filter by the service delivery location, not the council's head office.
Contract value thresholds
Define a minimum and maximum contract value. Spot placements under £10,000 and framework agreements worth £50 million are both filtered out if they fall outside the range that makes commercial sense for your organisation.
Commissioning authority type
Choose to receive alerts from NHS ICBs only, local authorities only, or both. NHS Continuing Healthcare bids and Care Act-funded local authority contracts require different evidence — knowing which commissioner published the notice changes how you respond.
On DPS mini-competitions specifically: providers who deliver domiciliary care tell us that missing a DPS call-off is the single most costly procurement failure — because mini-competitions often carry shorter windows (sometimes as few as 7 days) and because DPS providers are assumed to be ready to respond. CareBids sends DPS call-off alerts with a priority flag and a direct link to the call-off documents, separate from standard tender alerts. For more on how ICBs are now publishing care tenders, see our ICB care tender guide for 2026.
CareBids monitors 14 procurement portals so you don't have to.
Book a demo to see your personalised tender feed — filtered to your care type, geography, and contract value range before you log in.
What happens after you receive a tender alert
The alert is the start, not the end. CareBids connects each notification directly into the bid workflow — so the time between "alert received" and "first draft ready" is measured in minutes, not days. Providers tell us this is the difference between bidding with confidence and scrambling to meet a deadline.
Read the CareBids tender summary
Every alert includes a structured summary: commissioner, care type, service location, indicative contract value, deadline, and our three-layer eligibility score. You see at a glance whether it is worth opening the full documents.
Check your eligibility score
CareBids runs every opportunity through its Gatekeeper layer — checking your CQC registration, geographic reach, and accreditations against the stated requirements. If you fail a mandatory criterion, we tell you before you spend time reading a 60-page ITT.
Add to your bid pipeline
Mark the tender as 'In Progress' to start the bid workflow. CareBids logs the submission deadline, adds it to your calendar, and begins the AI bid writing draft using your provider profile. Providers tell us this cuts the time from 'alert received' to 'first draft ready' from days to under an hour.
Submit — and save to your library
After submission, approved responses are saved to your bid content library. The next time a similar tender drops — same care type, similar quality sections — CareBids pulls from your library first, so you are not writing from scratch.
Once a draft is in progress, our AI bid writing tool takes over — generating structured responses from your CQC registration data, your staffing model, and your existing quality statements. The alert-to-draft pipeline means you spend your time reviewing and strengthening evidence, not searching procurement portals and starting from a blank page.
Frequently asked questions
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