Head of Patient Safety

Job summary

At Herefordshire and Worcestershire Integrated Care Board, we are looking for an experienced patient safety clinician to work within the Nursing and Quality ICB Team. The successful candidate will be responsible for developing, monitoring and proposing measures to improve patient care and experience across the system. You should be passionate about patient safety as this role is an integral part of ensuring the ICB provides compassionate and collaborative care and expert support to the patient safety work within the system. This role supports the development of the National Patient Safety Strategy in implementing a patient safety culture and safety systems of work.

Main duties of the job

Reporting to the Associate Director of Nursing & Quality, the postholder will oversee and line manage the team ensuring strong facilitation, coordination, and management of processes in order to continuously inform and drive improvement in the quality of care across the system. Working closely with senior colleagues, the postholder will refine, develop, implement and manage quality assurance and safety and help to influence system improvement for the ICB across a wide-ranging portfolio.

Job responsibilities

In collaboration with the Associate Director for Nursing and Quality & Patient Safety Specialist, develop and consistently apply an ICB Quality Assurance and Improvement Framework for overseeing insight led quality improvement for care delivered by commissioned providers.

In collaboration with provider organisations, agree a programme of quality themed visits in order to develop insight and inform improvement in the standard of clinical care delivery within contracted and commissioned services.

Lead Quality team colleagues in identifying and analysing intelligence and insight metrics.

Help to coordinate the implementation of the NHS patient safety strategy across the ICB.

Provide patient safety expertise/leadership within the ICB, demonstrating compassionate leadership, visibility and supporting the continued development of the patient safety culture.

Oversee and support patient safety improvement, ensuring that systems thinking, human factors understanding and just culture principles are embedded in patient safety processes.

Ensure the organisation has a robust and effective patient safety implementation plan in place which aligns with the NHS patient safety strategy.

Promote patient safety insight as an approach that incorporates understanding all sources of patient safety intelligence, including from incidents, risk assessments, investigations, mortality and morbidity reviews, inquests, research, clinical audits, GIRFT reviews, positive experience, compliments and complaints, litigation, patient and staff surveys, in line with the measurement principles set out in the NHS Patient Safety Strategy.

Ensure information and intelligence from these sources is used as the basis for prioritising local patient safety development and ensuring proposed improvement approaches are based on an understanding of underlying causes.

Support / lead multi-professional responses to patient safety incidents, tailoring the different approaches required for new or under-recognised issues and wider patient safety challenges needing long-term improvement, ensuring adherence to national policies and enabling timely and good quality reporting.

Support an approach to patient safety that drives improvement across the patient pathway beyond the organisations boundaries, including facilitating multi-agency reviews where required.

Support / lead the implementation of continuous improvement of quality and impact of incident investigations, currently through the new Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF).

Support (in providers) the Executives systems for the response to National Patient Safety Alerts.

Lead on the escalation and review of Quality risks for the ICB Board Assurance Framework and Risk Register. Articulate emerging risk indicators for approval of the Associate Director of Nursing & Quality.

Monitor and review the progress of providers in delivering against quality improvement action plans to demonstrate that change has been successfully implemented.

Review, scrutinise, critically appraise, respond to and report on a wide range of insight and evidence in support of quality and patient safety standards, best practice evidence and assurance related to commissioned services and providers.

Work with patient safety and quality colleagues to draw insight from service concerns, complaints, learning responses and other sources of intelligence and ensure that themes and learning inform relevant Programme Boards.

Attend contract monitoring boards for provider organisations to report and escalate quality insight within assigned portfolio and inform monitoring and reporting mechanisms to receive assurance from place.

Engage where required in completing service reviews and in informing the development of service specifications.

Provide forward thinking and compassionate leadership. Supervise and manage direct reporting roles ensuring that the team are adequately supported to undertake their roles effectively. Lead team member appraisals and revalidation.

Deputise for the Associate Director of Nursing & Quality & Patient Safety Specialist as required.

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

• Experienced candidate with a clinical qualification such as RN or equivalent registered health care professional

Experience

Essential

• Management at a senior level in a healthcare setting
• Experience of Quality assurance and improvement methodology or processes
• Effective line management of a team of employees with the ability to motivate and positively influence others
• Leading clinical reviews and learning events
• Experience of influencing the work and priorities of others outside of the postholder's line management or organisation including delivering complex change programmes in a partnership environment

Skills

Essential

• Will consider the most effective way to promote equality of opportunity and good working relationships in employment and service delivery and has the ability to take actions which support and promote this agenda.

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
UK Registration

Applicants must have current UK professional registration.