Request for Proposal/Information

To be fair and impartial all potential health providers need to have the opportunity to present their services for consideration.

Benefits of open requests include:

• ensuring fairness to potential providers;
• improving decision making by considering a range of potential purchasing options;
• identifying new potential providers (or groups of providers);
• helping to establish reasonable prices for services; 
• using competition to improve the efficiency and quality of services for clients.

When the number of potential responses is large, the Board may use Requests for Information (RFI) followed by Requests for Proposals (RFP) to ensure the volume of responses is manageable and transaction costs are kept to a minimum for all parties.

Request for Information

A Request for Information invites providers to register their interest in providing the services and to submit a summary of their skills and abilities (or other preliminary information required). 

It is used as a pre-qualification process to create a short-list of potential providers who will be invited to submit detailed proposals.  If the process identifies only one potential provider the Board may proceed straight to negotiations with that provider.

Requests for Information are also used in complex or high risk purchases to gather preliminary information about existing potential providers’ ability and experience so the Board can formulate a more detailed purchasing strategy.

Request for Proposals

A Request for Proposal invites potential providers to submit a detailed description of a proposal for the services required. 

It is used to gather detailed information from a small number of potential providers about how they propose to deliver a service, or what services they propose to deliver to achieve certain objectives and/or outcomes for the target group concerned. 

RFP Process flow diagram

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