01134790803
9 September 2026

How to Use Case Studies and Evidence in NHS Tender Responses

Most suppliers bidding for NHS work have relevant experience. The harder part is turning that experience into evidence an evaluator can actually use when scoring the response.

A strong NHS tender case study does more than prove that you have delivered a similar contract before. It shows what you did, what changed as a result and why that experience should give the buyer confidence in your ability to deliver their requirement. Whether you provide construction, FM, technology, workforce solutions or professional services, the principle is the same: don’t ask the evaluator to take your capability on trust.

What counts as evidence in an NHS tender?

Case studies are important, but they are only one form of evidence.

Evidence can include almost anything that objectively demonstrates how your organisation has performed. Depending on the contract, that might include:

The strongest evidence will vary according to the question. An estates contractor may need to demonstrate programme certainty, quality and disruption control. A digital supplier might focus on implementation times, availability and user adoption. A recruitment provider could evidence fill rates, compliance and retention.

If you regularly pursue NHS opportunities, this is one reason to build your evidence base before an ITT arrives. As we discuss in our guide to NHS framework bid strategies, framework mini-competitions can move quickly. Waiting until the tender is live to start searching for performance data puts unnecessary pressure on the bid.

Turn claims into evidence

One of the simplest ways to improve an NHS tender response is to look for unsupported claims. Consider these three statements:

We have extensive experience delivering complex contracts.

That tells the evaluator very little.

We currently deliver comparable services across five NHS organisations.

Better. We now have some evidence of relevant experience. But it can usually go further:

We currently deliver comparable services across five NHS organisations, achieving an average 98% KPI compliance rate over the last 12 months.

Now the supplier is not merely saying it has experience. It is showing how well it performs.

A useful way to test a response is:

Claim → Evidence → Relevance → Assurance

For example:

The final two steps matter. Evidence becomes much more persuasive when the evaluator does not have to work out for themselves why it is relevant.

Choose the most relevant case study, not the most impressive

There can be a temptation to automatically use your largest NHS client, biggest contract or most prestigious project. That isn’t always the best evidence. If the tender is for a regional contract worth £500,000 a year, a £20 million national programme may actually be less useful than a smaller example delivered in comparable circumstances.

When choosing an NHS tender case study, consider:

Factor What to look for
Scope Did you deliver similar goods, works or services?
Scale Was the contract comparable in size and resource requirements?
Environment Were there similar operational constraints?
Complexity Did you manage comparable risks, stakeholders or dependencies?
Buyer Was the customer similar to the organisation now procuring?
Outcomes Do you have measurable evidence of successful delivery?
Recency Is the example recent enough to remain relevant?

You may also need different examples for different questions. A construction project that demonstrates working safely in an occupied hospital could be ideal for a question about operational disruption. A different contract might give you much stronger evidence of social value, mobilisation or supply-chain management.

Our guide to RM6320 Construction Works and Associated Services 3 gives a good example of this in an NHS estates context. Experience of live healthcare sites, constrained access and complex stakeholder management becomes valuable because those are directly relevant delivery risks.

What if you don’t have previous NHS experience?

Not every supplier pursuing NHS work will already have an NHS case study. Unless the procurement specifically requires particular previous experience, that does not mean your evidence is automatically irrelevant. The key is identifying transferable experience.

An FM supplier might not have maintained an NHS estate before, but could have managed:

A construction contractor may have experience working around vulnerable building users, maintaining access and controlling noise, dust or disruption in another live environment. Meanwhile, a technology supplier could have implemented systems for another public-sector body with comparable security, availability, integration and stakeholder requirements. The important thing is to explain the connection.

Don’t write three paragraphs describing a council contract and leave the NHS evaluator to decide whether it is relevant. Identify the conditions that are comparable and explain what that experience demonstrates about your proposed delivery.

Person typing on a laptop next to a stethoscope

How to structure an NHS tender case study

There is no single format that every NHS tender requires. However, a simple structure can prevent case studies becoming long descriptions of previous contracts.

Context

Briefly establish the customer, contract and scope. Only include information that helps the evaluator understand why the example is relevant.

Requirement or challenge

What did the customer need? What made the project difficult or comparable to the current opportunity?

This could include a demanding mobilisation period, a live environment, multiple stakeholders, strict performance standards or a requirement to deliver significant change.

Your approach

Explain what your organisation actually did. This is where you demonstrate processes, responsibilities, controls and expertise. Avoid writing so much about the customer or project that your own contribution disappears.

Results

What changed because of your actions? This is where numbers are particularly useful.

Relevance

Finally, connect the example back to the current requirement. If the question concerns mobilisation, explain how the example demonstrates your ability to mobilise this contract. If it concerns service continuity, show why the previous result provides confidence in your resilience arrangements. This last step is often missing from otherwise good case studies.

Quantify outcomes wherever you can

Specific evidence is generally more persuasive than broad statements of success.

For a construction or estates contract, useful evidence might include:

For FM, you might use:

For digital and technology contracts, consider:

For workforce contracts, evidence could include:

The same principle applies to social value. NHS England’s Social Value Playbook emphasises the importance of measurable contractual commitments and KPIs. If your tender says that you have successfully delivered social value before, evidence such as jobs created, apprenticeships delivered, volunteering hours or measurable environmental outcomes is considerably stronger than simply stating that social value is important to your organisation.

Don’t invent precision you can’t prove

Quantification is useful, but only when the figures are defensible. If you write that a previous intervention reduced costs by 27%, you should know where that figure came from.

Ideally, tender evidence should be traceable to sources such as:

This matters increasingly in a public procurement environment where contract performance itself is becoming more visible. Under the Procurement Act 2023, many public contracts worth more than £5 million require contracting authorities to set KPIs and subsequently assess and publish supplier performance against them. The government’s guidance on public contract KPIs provides more detail.

There is also an important distinction between organisation-wide statistics and contract-specific evidence. “99.9% uptime across our customer base” can demonstrate general capability. It does not prove that you achieved 99.9% uptime on the comparable project you have just described. Make sure the wording reflects what the data actually shows.

Put evidence next to the claim it supports

Some tender responses contain several paragraphs of methodology followed by a box labelled Case Study. The case study may be good, but its relationship with the preceding answer is unclear. Evidence usually works harder when it appears alongside the claim it is proving.

For example:

We use weekly readiness reviews throughout mobilisation to identify dependencies and potential slippage before they threaten go-live. On a recent comparable implementation, this process identified a delay in third-party system access three weeks before launch, allowing us to agree a revised testing sequence and maintain the original go-live date.

That is more convincing than stating the methodology first and putting an unrelated mobilisation case study two pages later. Think of evidence as something that runs through the answer rather than an appendix to it.

Match your evidence to the scoring criteria

A strong case study can still be poor tender evidence if it proves the wrong thing. If the question asks about business continuity, an example of excellent mobilisation performance is not enough. If it asks about innovation, telling the evaluator you routinely review service delivery does not demonstrate an innovative outcome. If it asks about social value, a general corporate CSR programme may contribute little unless it demonstrates outcomes relevant to the commitment you are proposing. Start with the tender question and assessment methodology, then choose the evidence.

This has become particularly important under the Procurement Act. Assessment summaries must explain scores by reference to relevant information within the tender, reinforcing the importance of making the evidence against each criterion clear and easy for an evaluator to identify. You can see the detail in the government’s guidance on assessment summaries. In other words, don’t make the evaluator hunt for the proof.

Use different levels of evidence

Not every claim needs a 300-word case study. We find it useful to think in terms of three levels.

Micro-evidence might be a single sentence:

We achieved 99.4% statutory compliance across the previous 12 months.

A short example might take a paragraph to demonstrate how a particular process worked and what it achieved.

A full case study is more appropriate when the tender explicitly asks for examples of comparable contracts, references or detailed evidence.

Choosing the right level matters when word counts are tight. Evidence should strengthen your answer without consuming space that is needed to explain the proposed solution.

Use customer feedback carefully

Testimonials can be useful, but they rarely substitute for objective performance evidence.

Compare:

The customer was extremely satisfied with our service.

with:

Customer satisfaction averaged 96% during the final 12 months of the contract against a 90% target.

The second gives the evaluator something tangible.

If you have both the performance figure and concise attributable customer feedback, they can complement each other. But generic praise should not take priority over evidence of delivery.

Build an NHS tender evidence library

One of the best times to collect evidence is before you need it. For each useful contract or project, consider recording:

It is also useful to tag evidence by themes such as:

That makes it much easier to find an appropriate example when an NHS tender asks a specific question.

For instance, your accreditations and policies may establish that appropriate information-governance controls exist, but your evidence needs to show how those controls actually operate in delivery. We explore that distinction further in our guide to information governance in NHS bids.

Similarly, if construction opportunities form part of your NHS pipeline, the upcoming NHS SBS Public Sector Construction Works 2 framework is a good example of an opportunity where preparing relevant project evidence before the tender period can make the eventual bid significantly easier.

Common NHS tender evidence mistakes

Before submitting, look out for a few recurring problems:

The best NHS tender case studies make the evaluator’s job easier. The relevance should be obvious.

NHS tender evidence checklist

Before finalising a response, ask:

  1. Does each important claim have supporting evidence where evidence is available?
  2. Does the example prove what the question is actually assessing?
  3. Is it genuinely comparable to the proposed contract?
  4. Have we explained what we did?
  5. Have we included measurable outcomes?
  6. Can every statistic be substantiated?
  7. Is the evidence recent enough to be credible?
  8. Have we explained why it matters to this NHS buyer?
  9. Is the evidence positioned alongside the claim it supports?
  10. Could the evaluator quickly understand how our previous performance reduces the risk of appointing us?

Turn your experience into evidence evaluators can score

Having relevant experience is valuable, but an evaluator can only score what appears in your tender.

The strongest responses turn previous performance into clear evidence of future capability. They select examples because they are relevant, quantify results where possible and explain exactly why that past delivery should give the buyer confidence in the proposed solution.

At Bidding, we help suppliers turn operational experience into clear, evidence-led NHS tender responses. Through our NHS bid support and wider bid writing services, we can help you identify your strongest examples, draw out measurable outcomes and integrate them into responses that directly address the buyer’s requirements.

Whether you’re preparing an individual NHS tender, a framework application or reviewing an existing submission, Bidding can help you make the evidence you already have work harder.

01134790803
info@biddingltd.co.uk

Bidding
The Wellsprings
Howell Croft S
Bolton
Greater Manchester
BL1 1SB

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