Following meetings with the British Association for Cytopathology (BAC), Public Health England (PHE) and the IBMS, the following has been agreed.
The announcement by NHS England that Primary HPV testing within the NHS Cervical Screening Programme will be implemented fully across England by the end of December 2019.
To support this, the agreement of a strategy to commission up to a maximum of 13 laboratory services, was made in late 2017.
At a stakeholder meeting in early February, attended by the BAC, IBMS and others, information and detail on the timescales and processes was shared.
A national service specification is currently being drawn up by NHS England which will include the laboratory aspects of the new service.
NHS England indicated that the procurement process for the new service will be a two stage process.
The first stage will be a National Framework of providers, from which regional NHS England teams will draw down from and run the second stage of the process, via regional mini-procurement exercises.
