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Quality and Safety Lead Midwife

The closing date is 24 August 2025

Band 8b Quality and Safety Lead Midwife - BLMK, LMNS, ICB (Fixed Term 1 Year)

An exciting leadership opportunity in maternity transformationAre you an experienced, dynamic, and enthusiastic midwifery leader passionate about driving safer, more personalised care for women and families? Do you have experience working at a system or regional level, with a proven ability to lead quality and safety improvements across maternity services? We are seeking a Quality and Safety Lead Midwife to join our BLMK, Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS) Senior Leadership Team on a fixed-term 1-year contract/Secondment. This is a fantastic opportunity for a highly motivated individual to play a pivotal role in achieving our LMNS vision of creating safer, more personalised maternity care.

About the role:As a key member of the BLMK, LMNS leadership team, you will lead and develop the quality and safety workstreams forming part of our local maternity transformation plan. You'll work collaboratively with midwives, obstetricians, neonatologists, commissioning colleagues, ICB partners, and wider stakeholders involved in safety and governance across the LMNS, ICB.

If you are passionate about maternity safety and ready for a leadership challenge at system level, we invite you to apply and join us in transforming maternity services for our local families.Closing Date: 01 August 2025For informal enquiries, contact: Felitta Burney-Nicol - Chief Midwife for LMNC, ICB - Felitta.burney-nicol1@nhs.net

Main duties of the job

Key requirements:

• Significant leadership experience in maternity governance, safety and quality improvement
• Experience working at system, regional or organisational leadership level
• Proven track record in incident investigation and delivering service improvements
• Strong interpersonal, communication and partnership-building skills
• Ability to lead, develop and deliver complex projects and workstreams

About us

We are committed to promoting equal opportunities to achieve equity of access, experience and outcomes and to recognising and valuing people's differences. We are passionate about creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values diversity; we see this as a strength and part of our founding mission, values and behaviours. We know through experience that different ideas, perspectives and backgrounds create a stronger and more creative work environment that delivers patient outcomes.

We are committed to creating the best place to work, where your contribution is valued, your wellbeing is supported and all our colleagues can reach their full potential. We welcome and encourage applications from all areas of the community, who meet the criteria for the role, regardless of their protected characteristic. We work to ensure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible to everyone, including making adjustments for people who have a disability or long-term condition and support with the recruitment process for people with lived experience.

We are happy to discuss flexible working options for all roles.

We operate a Carer friendly working environment that is supportive and inclusive. We actively encourage Carers to self-identify themselves.

We are a Disability Confident Employer and commit to shortlisting suitable applicants who meet the essential criteria for an interview. Please inform us of any adjustments you may require.

Job responsibilities

- As a senior leader across the LMNS, create a positive and respectful leadership relationships that commit to delivering wide scale system change, ensuring the LMNS acts as an enabler to improve the safety of maternity services and population health of BLMK.

- Support the BLMK LMNS team to develop and enhance strong working relationships with partners and key stakeholders to ensure the effective delivery of the LMNS ambitions, strategies, and plans.

- As a system leader and role model, provide leadership across organisational and professional boundaries to facilitate shared learning, risk identification and support transformation change for the maternity population.

- Influence and work collaboratively as part of a wider system to create opportunities to make sustainable long-term quality improvements to maternity care achieving the opportunities for efficiencies of working at scale that the LMNS represents.

- Ensure continued effective relationships with multiple key stakeholders including NHS providers, local authorities, Health Watch and other patient groups and the voluntary sector which will be required to support the partnership and ICP vision and strategy.

- Pro-actively manage stakeholders, respond to, and resolve conflict between different stakeholders.

- Work with providers to improve adverse performance where necessary.

- Through effective leadership of the transformational programmes, support and enable an approach with co-production at the centre ensuring the voices of our partners, local communities and population are heard and remain at the heart of all decisions.

- Establish behaviours of an effective and compassionate patient safety reporting, learning and improvement system including openness, a just culture, continuous learning, and improvement.

- Support and promote a culture of inclusive leadership.

- Be visible as a collaborative senior leader and role model, across the whole system in the development and delivery of the LMNS plan.

- Share responsibility as part of the BLMK LMNS to ensure the LMNS exercises its functions at system and place effectively, efficiently, economically, with good governance.

- Be responsible for leading, influencing and contributing to the ICB plans, wider system strategies and policies of the ICB, with the aim of driving innovation, the reduction of health inequalities and achieving better life outcomes across the system.

- Contribute to programmes and developments on a regional and/or national basis as required as this relates to the delivery of ICS, ICB and LMNS objectives and ensures the promotion of the reputation of our system and BLMK.

- Develop/build upon sound relationships and links with a wide range of stakeholders related to Maternity and neonatal services and their interdependencies. Including service users, Hospital Trusts, ICB, Mental Health Trusts, Directors and Heads of Midwifery, Community and Acute maternity teams, Obstetricians, GPs and primary care, voluntary organisations, the independent sector, Local Authorities, ODNs and NHSE Network leads.

- Have experience of wider safety agenda, experience at a regional level sighted on safety threats nationally to be able to take a proactive approach by interpreting and presenting National policy details and recommendations to a range of audiences. Lead on behalf of the LMNS/ICB the work with other senior leaders across health and social care to ensure an integrated approach to strategic planning, development and service and system transformation on behalf of the LMNS, ensuring alignment with local priorities, national guidance.

- To make formal and informal presentations to large groups (e.g. ICB and LMNS), on specific projects, project plans and related progress. Develop status reports and proposals for improvement and transformation, and using highly effective presentation skills, deliver proposals for change to senior executives/clinical colleagues.

- To complete reporting to the LMNS team, East of England Regional team, ICB and NHS England and other formal bodies as required.

Person Specification

Professional Registration

• Registered Midwife, with relevant up to date registration and experience
• Educated to master's level qualification or equivalent level of experience working at a senior level in specialist area
• A management qualification (e.g. Diploma In Management Studies) Evidence of continuous professional development
• Qualified PRINCE 2 practitioner or equivalent

Experience

• Extensive knowledge of specialist areas, acquired through post graduate diploma or equivalent experience or training plus further specialist knowledge or experience to master's level equivalent.
• Evidence of post qualifying and continuing professional development
• Must have an understanding of the background to and aims of current healthcare policy in BLMK and appreciate the implications of this on engagement.
• Should have an appreciation of the relationship between the Department of Health, the ICB, Local Authorities and individual provider and commissioning organisations
• Demonstrable experience of working in a large complex organisation
• Hold good understanding of Quality improvement methodology and have experience of implementing improvement projects
• Experience of working within the NHS.

Organisational Skills

• Ability to manage competing priorities in a busy and changing environment.
• Must be able to provide and receive highly complex, sensitive or contentious information, negotiate with senior stakeholders on difficult and controversial issues, and present complex and sensitive information to large and influential groups.
• Negotiate on difficult and controversial issues including performance and change.

Flexibility

• Ability to travel to other sites within the BLMK area
• Able to work outside of traditional. office hours on occasion

Analytical

• Problem solving skills and ability to respond to sudden unexpected demands
• Ability to analyse complex facts and situations and develop a range of options.
• Takes decisions on difficult and contentious issues where there may be a number of courses of action
• Strategic thinking - ability to anticipate and resolve problems before they arise

Planning Skills

• Demonstrated capability to plan over short, medium and long-term timeframes and adjust plans and resource requirements accordingly
• Comprehensive experience of project principles techniques and tools such as Prince 2 and Managing Successful Projects

Management Skills

• Must be able to prioritise own work effectively and be able to direct activities of others. Experience of managing and motivating a team and reviewing performance of the individuals.

Autonomy Freedom to Act

• Must be able to use initiative to decide relevant actions and make recommendations to Sponsor/ Manager, with the aim of improving deliverables and compliance to policies
• Ability to make decisions autonomously, when required, on difficult issues, working to tight and often changing timescales.
• Experience of identifying and interpreting National policy. Experience of researching best practice (globally, private and public sector), interpreting its relevance and processes/ practices which could be implemented successfully to achieve system reform (advising on policy implementation)

Physical Skills

• Working knowledge of Microsoft Office with intermediate keyboard skills

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.

NHS Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care Board