University Hospitals of Leicester seeking to outsource patients letters

University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust is seeking to outsource production of more than 700,000 letters to its patients every year. The £8m contract over five years aims to improve the quality of information sent to patients and free up staff for other tasks. Shirley Priestnall, the trust's information manager, said: "We have had the current system we use to produce letters for a long time. It is really inefficient and difficult to make alterations on the letters to suit the different documents and we are restricted to using a single side of paper for printing because of the way it works. By outsourcing we will be able to improve the quality of letters going to patients."