Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group is going to tender children’s community health services with the aim of having them run under one contract rather than the existing five.

The biggest provider is Great Western Hospital, whose staff run the health visiting and school nurse service plus other services including speech and language therapy and learning disability nurses throughout Wiltshire.

The value of the contract with GWH is £8m and runs until April 2015.

The other providers are; Sirona Health and Social Care based in Bath, which provides a children’s community nursing service, community paediatricians and audiology to west and parts of north Wiltshire; the Royal United Hospital, Bath, which provides occupational therapy and physiotherapy; Swindon Council which provides health occupational therapy and physiotherapy in east Wiltshire and Salisbury District Hospital which provides children’s community nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy in south Wiltshire.

At a meeting on Tuesday in Devizes the CCG’s governing body agreed to retender the services with the intention of having a single contract in place for April 2015.

Deborah Fielding, chief officer of the CCG, said: “We are going out to tender looking for a single contract, not necessarily a single provider – some of the resources are very scarce, for example people who do roles like designated doctors – so we may sub-provide.

"We met with our existing providers last week. They welcomed this move. They are very much on board helping us to design the service.”