What does PSR cover?
The Provider Selection Regime, the Health Services (Provider Selection Regime) Regulations 2023 and NHS England statutory guidance, sets how relevant NHS bodies arrange specified healthcare services: direct award, most-suitable-provider, and competitive processes designed for care continuity rather than open competition. Its scope is services, not buyers: the same trust buying cleaning and commissioning community nursing runs two different regimes in the same year. Confirm the classification against current PSR statutory guidance before treating any NHS notice as PSR or non-PSR; scope edges move, and this page routes rather than rules.
Where do non-clinical suppliers sit?
Consultancy, IT and digital, estates and facilities, recruitment, and professional services sold to NHS bodies generally run under procurement rules, the procedures, participation evidence, and award logic elsewhere in this guide: procedures, PSQ, MAT. “Generally” carries weight: the notice decides, and framework call-offs and dynamic-market competitions add their own mechanics on top; see frameworks and dynamic markets. Clinical delivery and hospital construction are outside this page’s ICP: boundaries, not targets.
What about mixed requirements?
Split first, gate second. A contract bundling clinical service delivery with facilities management, or digital platforms with clinical pathways, may straddle regimes, with different procedures, evidence, and remedies per half. Bidding the bundle on one regime’s logic misprices risk on the other half. Where the split is unclear from the notice, that is a clarification question through official channels, and a review, not a bid, until answered. The Australian health-buyer context, for cross-border readers, is selling to Australian health buyers: a different statute book, labelled as such.
What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?
Classify, then gate: non-clinical under procurement rules with the standard three axes; clinical-adjacent only with the PSR position confirmed; mixed only after the split. An NHS logo on the cover is buyer context, not a regime answer. The regime selector is the UK pillar.