Head of Patient Safety

Reporting to the Associate Director of Nursing & Quality, the postholder will oversee and line manager 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.
Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB and its partners work collaboratively to commission, plan, monitor, deliver and improve health and care services for over 806,000 people across two counties and surrounding boundaries. With a workforce of over 300 employees and a budget of £1.19 billion to commission hospital, community and mental health services, it is a dynamic, forward-looking and vibrant place to work, set within the backdrop of some of the country's most beautiful countryside.
We provide a supportive and collaborative environment, offering opportunities for our staff to reach their full potential and develop a rewarding career. We enable our employees to achieve a positive work-life balance through a blend of collaborative workplace attendance combined with regular home working. Joining our inclusive and innovative team comes with a range of attractive benefits including:
Employee Assistance Programmes and access to a wealth of on-line health and wellbeing support
Competitive NHS Pension Scheme
Comprehensive opportunities to learn new skills and to develop your career within a caring and inclusive environment.
Generous holiday entitlement, which increases in line with service, with the opportunity to purchase additional leave.
Flexible working patterns to support work-life balance.
- 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 organisation’s 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 re