Mortality Lead

We have an exciting opportunity for a senior clinician to lead our newly established Learning from Deaths Mortality Team. We are looking for a colleague with experience in strategic development and direct management of mortality, with a proven track record in utilising learning from mortality reviews to improve the care of people with a serious mental illness, learning disability or autism.

This role is pivotal to the Trust’s objective of delivering outstanding care every time through implementation of the National Quality Board’s framework for learning from deaths. This role and the newly established mortality team will work in partnership with the already established patient safety team under the direction of the Medical Director for Quality and accountable to the Chief Medical Officer.
- Development and implementation of a clear mortality strategy, informed by current national policy and guidance.
- Work with Trust’s Quality Governance structure, providing a senior clinical opinion on learning from deaths
- Collaboration and engagement with specialist mortality programmes including learning disability national mortality programme and developing close working relationships with Coroners, Medical Examiners, and other external agencies.
- Reporting on assurance to the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nurse and Trust Board, setting out the learning from structured judgement reviews, thematic reviews, and mortality investigations to evidence good practice and areas of learning.
- Work with the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nurse and Deputy Medical Directors to identify the most impactful actions to reduce avoidable deaths and avoidable harm, in order to inform the Trust’s annual quality and safety priorities, the work of the QI Academy and clinical education programmes.
- Act as an ambassador for the Trust, regularly attending external meetings and bringing back useful intelligence to inform development activity and decision-making.

In return we can offer you an exciting and challenging role, the opportunity to develop your skills in quality governance, supervision and support and personal development.

Here at NSFT we pride ourselves on being a welcoming, talented, friendly and supportive team who like nothing better than sharing experiences and learning from each other. In addition to ongoing training and development opportunities, we are committed to providing an environment in which you can thrive.

Why work for us?We have challenges as a Trust, but we have ambitious aspirations, are pushing ahead with exciting transformation work and we need dedicated individuals to support us on our journey. We have strong, established professional networks coupled with an exceptional leadership team who will ensure you are truly cared for and cared about.

Why Norfolk and Suffolk?The people here are warm and welcoming, you’ll never be far from the beautiful coastline or Broads National Park. We’re an hour and a half away from London and have an international airport in Norwich too. Our villages, towns and cities are packed full of history, independent cafes, shops and theatres. We have excellent shopping, eating out, top ranking schooling and affordable house prices too.

The Mortality Lead is pivotal to the Trust’s objective of delivering outstanding care every time. The post holder will be responsible for implementation of the National Quality Board’s framework for learning from deaths within the Trust, ensuring that opportunities to learn from cases and prevent repeat causes of harm are maximised.

The role includes developing
- Robust systems and processes for mortality review and learning across the Trust to support high quality, safe and effective care.
- Developing timely systems and process for engaging, reporting and feeding back to bereaved families following mortality reviews relating to a patient’s death.
- Working with clinical teams to identify and develop quality improvement work / mortality reduction strategies across the Trust.
- Using the outputs of the mortality review process to influence quality and safety priorities within the trust and training for staff.
- Facilitate learning through differing modes of communication to enable all staff regardless of grade or role to understand both the importance and their ability to improve patient care.
- To contribute to multi-organisational initiatives to tackle the health inequalities experienced by people with a serious mental illness or learning disability.
- Briefing the Board and Clinical Executives on levels of avoidable harm and themes emerging from structured judgement reviews and mortality alerts
- Working with partner organisations to establish systems and processes for the implementation of the NHS E Medical Examiner strategy.
- To enable and support compliance with all relevant CQC, NHS Resolution and National Quality Board standards and any subsequent legislative requirement or other standard or national guidance relevant to Learn