Selling to the NHS: the practitioner's deep dive

What you’ll learn

• How NHS money actually flows — Parliament to DHSC to commissioner to provider — and why "who pays for this?" is usually the hardest question in the deal, not "does anyone want it?".
• The full stakeholder cast: fourteen roles, what each one is measured on, what each can authorise, how to earn their time, and the political fault lines running between them.
• The routes that genuinely get a supplier inside a trust — clinical champions, innovation bodies, national programmes, market engagement — and an honest account of what cold outreach does and doesn't achieve.
• The compliance gauntlet run in the right order, with a clear split between what you need before the first meeting and what you need before contract.
• How a framework call-off and a competitive tender actually run, how evaluators score, how to write for them, and the errors that get bids binned unread.
• Pilot design that converts: the contract terms, the success criteria, the sign-off route and the pricing that stops a pilot eating the real deal.
• The evidence ladder in detail — service evaluation versus research, budget impact versus cost-effectiveness, and the current NICE routes — plus how a small vendor builds evidence on a small budget.
• A realistic fourteen-month deal anatomy: the artefacts, meetings and blockers at every stage.