Short-term deal was intended to help programme’s senior managers make targeted interventions and present information to other parties in a way that was ‘appropriate and impactful’

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The NHS recently signed a £1m deal with McKinsey in which the consultancy was brought in to advise senior managers of the Covid-19 vaccination programme on how to analyse and present data.

Newly published procurement information reveals that NHS England entered into short-term engagement with the consulting firm on 13 December. The contract, which was valued at £1.03m, ran until 28 February.

The NHS was seeking an external partner to help officials leading the vaccine programme to assess data to best understand where action was needed to support local rollouts of the jab. McKinsey was also asked to provide guidance on the presentation of vaccination data to external parties.

According to the contract-award notice, the firm was asked “to support the SLT (senior leadership team) interpreting and presenting data from the [vaccination] programme to various bodies; understand variations in performance so that appropriate interventions can be identified; and ultimately to ensure that the information presented externally from the programme is valid, appropriate and impactful”.

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The contract, which was awarded as a call-off from a framework agreement, is the latest in a large number of deals McKinsey has won to provide support to the government’s pandemic response. 

Online procurement records show that, since the beginning of the Covid outbreak, the firm has won 30 separate deals – chiefly from the Department of Health and Social Care – to support coronavirus-related programmes. These contracts were worth about £42m to the global consulting firm, and included £13m spent across three deals last year that were intended to enable “rapid response” to issues related to the NHS Test and Trace programme.

In recent years, the firm has also won a range of of non-Covid contracts with public bodies, including a £3m eight-week deal last year to provide the Central Digital and Data Office and the Government Digital Service with “expert consultancy support to design the cross-departmental approach to tackling core digital, data and technology priorities” across government.