Providers of NHS commissioned community paediatric services in England are invited to express their interest in funding of up to £75,000 towards improvement ideas for reducing the number of patients waiting over 18 weeks.
In a collaboration with NHS England’s Community Health Services team, bids can be submitted for locally tailored interventions to improve waiting time performance against Medium Term Planning Framework (MTPF) targets for community health services.
The NHS oversight framework includes a community health service (CHS) waiting times performance metric and the MTPF sets a national ambition for 78% of community health service waits to be less than 18 weeks by the end of 2026/27, extending to 80% by the end of 2028/29, with systems also expected to have clear plans to eliminate waits of more than 52 weeks.
Providers of NHS commissioned community paediatric services can apply for up to £75,000 for initiatives to address this, but must:
- be submitting their current waiting times position to the CHS SitRep;
- have patients reported in the (CYP) community paediatric service line waiting over 18 weeks;
- be willing to be supported by the GIRFT team to implement proposed improvement, including attendance at monthly drum beat improvement meetings to share best practice.
The full criteria for successful bids can be found in our GIRFT CYP community paediatrics improvement funding offer spec here.
Interested parties should submit bids of no more than 1,000 words by midnight on 27 September 2026 to england.girftcommunitywaitinglists@nhs.net.
Funding awards are expected to be allocated by 1 November 2026.
For more information regarding the bidding process, contact the community team via england.girftcommunitywaitinglists@nhs.net.
