Head of Service for Patient Safety, Incidents and Risk Assurance
Band 8b | Reporting to the Deputy Chief Nursing Officer
“Patient safety is not simply about what happens after an incident.It is about the culture we create before one happens.”
At NELFT, we are building an organisation where people feel safe to speak, safe to challenge, safe to learn and safe to belong.
We have fully implemented the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) and are now focused on maturing it: strengthening systems thinking, compassionate engagement, organisational learning and improvement across mental health and community services.
We believe that a just and compassionate culture and patient safety are inseparable. When staff experience psychological safety and belonging, they are better able to raise concerns, ask difficult questions, challenge respectfully and learn openly. When patients, carers and families are genuinely heard, their experience becomes a vital source of safety intelligence.
The opportunity
We are looking for an exceptional leader to become our Head of Service for Patient Safety, Incidents and Risk Assurance. This is one of the most important quality leadership roles in our organisation.
Reporting to the Deputy Chief Nursing Officer, you will provide Trust-wide leadership across patient safety, incident management, PSIRF, suicide prevention, Learning from Deaths, corporate and operational risk, LFPSE and assurance. You will work closely with clinical teams, senior leaders, patients, families and system partners, and you will provide expert advice and constructive challenge to the Quality and Safety Committee and the Trust Board.
Your portfolio will bring together
- Patient safety & PSIRF Trust-wide patient safety leadership, incident response, PSIRF policy and plan, compassionate engagement and learning.
- Risk & assurance Corporate and operational risk management, risk registers, Board Assurance Framework alignment and regulatory assurance.
- Learning from harm Learning from Deaths, mortality learning, suicide prevention and triangulation of themes across multiple sources of intelligence.
- Systems & reporting LFPSE compliance, incident and risk systems, data quality, national reporting, audit and Board-level assurance.
We want someone who can turn learning into safer care
Our ambition is not to measure success by how many investigations we complete or how many actions we close.
- Did practice change?
- Did the learning reach the frontline?
- Are patients safer?
- Did patients and families experience the difference?
- Have we reduced the likelihood of recurrence?
You will help us strengthen the connection between incidents, risk, mortality, suicide prevention, safeguarding, complaints, patient experience and other sources of intelligence – identifying patterns, anticipating risk and ensuring learning results in meaningful improvement.
PSIRF at NELFT
NELFT has fully implemented PSIRF. The person joining us will not be coming to introduce the framework; you will help us mature it.
You will lead the ongoing development of our Patient Safety Incident Response Policy and Plan and ensure that patients, service users, families, carers, staff, Governors, Non-Executive Directors and partners continue to shape how NELFT learns and improves.
Our focus is on proportionate learning responses, systems thinking, compassionate engagement and improvement – not simply completing investigations.
Compassion with accountability
We are committed to a culture where colleagues can speak openly about error and learning without fear – but where compassion never means an absence of accountability.
We want a leader who can hold complexity: someone able to ask difficult questions without creating fear, provide challenge without closing down conversation, and support teams through some of the most emotionally difficult moments in healthcare.
This role requires highly developed judgement and emotional intelligence. You will sometimes work with patients, families and staff after serious harm, and you will need to combine technical credibility with humanity, openness and respect.
Belonging is a patient-safety issue
- We are kind
- We are respectful
- We work together with our communities
At NELFT, we are increasingly connecting these values with a deeper sense of belonging across the organisation. People who feel they belong are more likely to contribute, question, challenge and speak up. Organisations that listen are safer organisations.
We therefore want a patient-safety leader who understands that culture is not separate from safety – culture creates the conditions for safety.
Who are we looking for?
You may already be a senior patient-safety, governance or risk leader. You may have led PSIRF implementation, complex incident systems, clinical risk or major organisational learning programmes. Whatever your background, you will need substantial senior leadership experience and deep expertise in patient-safety science, learning and improvement, governance, risk and regulatory assurance.
- Current registration with an appropriate health professional body.
- Master’s-level education or equivalent experience, with a risk management qualification or willingness to undertake one.
- Senior management experience in a large, complex organisation.
- Expertise in PSIRF / patient-safety science, learning and improvement.
- Experience of leading complex incident-reporting and risk-management systems and using data to support learning and improvement.
- Experience of corporate and operational risk registers, governance, regulation and Board-level assurance.
- Credibility to influence senior leaders, clinical teams and external partners, including when information is complex, sensitive or contentious.
- A strong record of leading and developing teams and translating national policy into local practice.
Why NELFT?
This is an exciting point in NELFT’s quality journey. We are strengthening professional and clinical leadership, developing our Quality Management System, deepening our Culture of Care and relational-care approach, and increasingly bringing patient safety, risk, mortality, safeguarding, patient experience and improvement together into a more integrated model of organisational learning.
You will have the opportunity to influence practice from the frontline to the Board, work across mental health and community services, shape our relationships with system partners and help define what excellent patient-safety leadership looks like in a large NHS organisation.
- If you want to manage incidents, there are many roles you could apply for.
- If you want to help build an organisation that learns differently, leads differently and becomes safer because of it, we would really like to hear from you.
Come and help us make patient safety everyone’s business.
For more information and an informal conversation please contact
Wellington Makala
Chief Nurse
Wellington.makala2@nhs.net
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