Head of Patient Safety and Governance

at  Northumbria Healthcare NHCT Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Are you a motivated and committed Senior Leader who is passionate about patient safety and clinical governance? If this appeals to you, then an exciting opportunity has arisen to join our successful team at Northumbria.
The role of Head of Patient Safety and Governance is crucial to enable Northumbria’s continued success in the delivery of outstanding care. You will ensure that the Trust has a continuous ‘forward look’ both in implementing the Trusts patient safety and clinical governance strategies and in ensuring a focus across the Trust on continuous improvements in these areas.
Improving patient safety, quality and productivity is an explicit priority and needs to underpin all elements of initiatives undertaken. Innovation and ambition for improvement are key for Northumbria in order to continue to provide safe and high-quality care, deliver the Trust’s strategic aims and objectives and promote a culture that is progressive, inclusive and values driven.
You will provide leadership and direction, providing expert guidance and support across our Business Units, collaborating with colleagues and stakeholders to identify risks and share learnings as we constantly strive to make the Trust the safest it can be. The role requires credibility and personal authority, to bring a depth and breadth of experience to address external environmental challenges and influence internal teams.

You will ensure close working relationships with both internal and external stakeholders.

• The post holder will develop effective strategy and operational policies for promoting patient safety and innovation in Northumbria Healthcare.
• To role model compassionate and inclusive leadership in order to shape the creation of a collective leadership culture within the trust. This means demonstrating a consistent leadership style which (a) engages, enables and empowers others (b) uses coaching to promote ownership of learning and quality improvement and (c) facilitates team working and collaboration within teams / departments and across organisational boundaries.

We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, covering one of the largest geographical areas of any NHS trust in the country. Leading in innovation and quality – opening a state of the art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, the first of its kind in England. Do you want to work in one of the best performing NHS organisations in England? Work in an organisation that supports its staff and focuses on staff experience as much as it does the experience of its patients? You can live and breathe in an area that has the cleanest air, cost effective living, great nightlife, some of the best schools with a wealth of history available on your doorstep. Sound too good to be true? Well it isn’t, this is what you get when you work for Northumbria Healthcare, this is the Northumbria Way! Please read ‘applicant guidance notes’ before submitting your application.

Working closely with colleagues across the sector, ensuring coherent strategy and will:

• Be accountable for legal responsibilities in delivering statutory patient safety duties for Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust in line with national requirements and regulatory bodies.
• Provide independent expertise and guidance for the purposes of maintaining patient safety, encompassing a whole healthcare system approach.
• Lead on a Trust wide approach to patient safety incidents, including the development and implementation of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF).
• Drive reform and support organisational change and uptake of initiatives that support excellence.
• Develop and communicate the vision for the role of innovation, and the development of patient safety strategy and operational policies to support this vision.
• Monitor compliance and evaluate impact by scrutinising process, whilst ensuring business units are responsive and accountable to patients, the public and wider stakeholders to continuously improve quality, safety and a culture of improvement.
• Work with the business units and the Board to ensure information and intelligence from incidents and emerging patient safety issues are used as the basis for wider patient safety best practice. Engage with key strategic regional and national policy makers to inform development of national strategy and policies.
• Provide expertise of best practice methodologies, regulatory requirements, policy imperatives, innovation and technological developments and stakeholders knowledge.
• Take responsibility for the overall leadership and management and associated staff within a given portfolio.
• Be responsible for the provision of synthesizing best evidence available, clinical advice operations and performance information, organisational and policy context and information on related activities from across the health and social care system into a coherent strategy.
• Demonstrate robust quality governance and clinical compliance, policies and programmes of work in line with the trust quality strategy.

Please refer the Job description for details