Head of CS - Under 18s Services

Salary: ~£60,000 depending on experience

Reports to: Director of Client Services

Join Us at The Centre for ADHD Research and Excellence: Shaping the Future of Accessible Healthcare

At Care ADHD, we’re improving access to high-quality neurodevelopmental services. We’re client‑centred and outcomes‑focused, with a strong emphasis on operational excellence: clear ways of working, consistent use of systems, and teams who know what “good” looks like. Our Under 18s service is newly launched and growing rapidly. The children and young people who come to us — and the families navigating this journey with them — deserve an experience that is warm, clear, and consistently excellent at every touchpoint.

We are now looking for a Head of Client Services to lead that experience. You will build and lead the client‑facing team for our Under 18s pathway, set the standard for how children, young people, and their families are treated, and develop a team of leads and individual contributors who embody that standard in every interaction. This is a rare opportunity to shape a newly launched service at a formative stage.

You will lead the teams responsible for family enquiries, referral processing, bookings, phones, complaints handling, and service recovery across our Under 18s pathway. You’ll play a critical role in ensuring that children, young people, parents, carers, and families experience a service that is warm, clear, responsive, and exceptionally well run. The culture, standards, and ways of working you establish here will define how thousands of families experience us for years to come.

This role is ideal for someone who combines strong operational leadership with genuine care for family experience, and who is energised by the opportunity to build, improve, and scale a high‑quality support function in a fast‑moving healthcare environment.

What we are looking for?

We’re looking for a senior operational leader who has experience running high-quality customer, patient, or family‑facing service teams in a complex environment. This role is best suited to someone who has already led a multi‑channel support or service function through Team Leads, managers, or equivalent mid‑level leaders, and who is confident owning performance, service quality, complaints handling, workforce planning, and continuous improvement.

You might currently be a Head of Client Services, Head of Customer Support, Head of Patient Services, Senior Operations Manager, or an experienced service leader ready to step into a broader Head‑of‑department role. Just as importantly, you will understand the difference between delivering a good service and building one. This is a leadership role for someone who can create structure, raise standards, develop managers, use data well, and help shape how a growing function operates.

Because this role supports children, young people, and families, we’re especially interested in people who bring experience from children’s services, healthcare, education, or other family‑facing and regulated environments where communication, judgement, and emotional intelligence really matter. This is a non‑clinical role. You do not need to be a clinician, but you do need to be comfortable working closely with clinical and operational colleagues to ensure families experience a joined‑up, high‑quality service.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Leading the full Under 18s Client Services function, with accountability for the performance, quality, and culture of the teams handling enquiries, referral processing, bookings, phones, complaints, and service recovery.
• Managing and developing a group of Team Leads, setting clear expectations, strengthening leadership capability, and building a culture of accountability, warmth, and high standards.
• Defining and embedding how the Under 18s Client Services department operates, including service standards, team structures, management rhythms, escalation routes, and day‑to‑day ways of working.
• Owning the department’s performance framework, including KPIs, service levels, reporting, and OKR delivery, and using data, feedback, and operational insight to identify issues and drive improvement.
• Reporting regularly to the Director of Client Services on departmental performance, complaints themes, operational risks, workforce pressures, and improvement priorities.
• Maintaining oversight of demand, workflow, and capacity across the function, identifying pinch points early and taking action to protect both service quality and team sustainability.
• Overseeing the handling of family, patient, guardian, and partner enquiries across the Under 18s pathway, ensuring communication is consistently warm, clear, responsive, and well organised.
• Owning non‑clinical complaints for the Under 18s pathway, ensuring concerns are handled with empathy, pace, sound judgement, and clear follow‑through.
• Using family feedback, complaint trends, and frontline insight to improve communication, reduce friction, and strengthen trust in the service.
• Working in close partnership with Clinical Ops leads to ensure handovers, communication, and escalation routes are joined up and effective, while maintaining a clear non‑clinical remit.
• Working closely with the Head of Client Services – Adult Services as a peer leader, sharing learning, aligning standards, and contributing to the wider Client Services strategy across Care ADHD.
• Partnering with Product, Operational Excellence, Governance, and other central teams to improve systems, workflows, policies, and the overall family journey.
• Leading workforce planning for the function, identifying future capability and capacity needs as the service grows, and contributing to recommendations on headcount, team structure, and process improvement.
• Developing and improving SOPs, playbooks, quality standards, and operational controls for the Under 18s Client Services teams, helping to build a department that scales with consistency and confidence.
• Leading recruitment, onboarding, and team design activity as needed, ensuring service delivery is sustainable without diluting standards, quality, or culture.

To Thrive In This Role You’ll Need To

• Have significant experience leading customer‑facing, patient‑facing, or service operations teams at scale, with direct accountability for Team Leads, managers, or equivalent mid‑level leaders.
• Be confident owning service performance in a complex, fast‑moving environment, rather than only delivering as an individual contributor.
• Have strong operational judgement, with the ability to balance service quality, team capacity, risk, and pace.
• Be comfortable working with performance data, service levels, complaints themes, and operational insight to make decisions and drive measurable improvement.
• Be an experienced people leader who knows how to develop managers over time, not just manage outcomes through them.
• Be highly organised and able to create structure, clarity, and consistency in a growing service.
• Be calm and credible in sensitive, emotionally complex, or high‑pressure situations.
• Be child and family‑centred in how you think about service quality, communication, and operational decision‑making.
• Be collaborative and pragmatic, with the ability to build effective working relationships across clinical, operational, and central teams.
• Be energised by building and improving services, not just maintaining established ones.

This Role Is Likely To Suit Someone Who Has

• Led a support, service, operations, or patient services function in healthcare, children’s services, education, or another regulated and people‑centred/outcomes focussed environment.
• Experience of overseeing complaints handling and escalations at a senior level.
• Managed through Team Leads or managers, with responsibility for their development and performance.
• Owned KPIs, reporting, workforce planning, and service improvement activity.
• Worked in an environment where quality of communication, responsiveness, and trust really matter to the people being supported.
• Experience helping a service grow or evolve over time.

Bonus Points If You Have

• Experience within neurodevelopmental, CAMHS, paediatric, or broader children and young people’s health pathways.
• Familiarity with NHS referral pathways, service access routes, or the commissioning landscape for children’s services.
• Experience in a high‑growth or rapidly scaling environment.
• Experience leading remote, hybrid, or geographically dispersed teams.
• Experience working closely with clinical and operational leaders to improve joined‑up service delivery.

This role is less likely to be a fit if:

• Your experience is primarily as an individual contributor rather than leading through managers or Team Leads.
• Your background is mainly in sales, account management, or commercial customer success rather than operational service delivery.
• You have not worked in environments involving children, families, healthcare, education, or other sensitive and regulated services.
• You are looking for a clinical leadership role or a role with responsibility for clinical decision‑making.
• You prefer highly established environments and are less energised by building new structures, processes, and teams.
• You have not previously owned performance, complaints, service standards, and operational improvement at a departmental level.

What We Value

Care is at the heart of who we are – in how we support patients, and in how we treat each other as colleagues. We believe the way we show up for each other is just as important as what we do. Skills matter, but it’s our mindset, behaviours and willingness to learn, adapt and improve that protect the supportive culture we’ve built, and help us thrive together. We value:

• Kindness – treating colleagues, partners, and everyone we support, with respect and care.
• Transparency – being open and honest so that trust can grow.
• Reflection – pausing to learn from experience and improve together.
• Growth mindset – always welcoming feedback and challenges as opportunities to develop.
• Accountability – taking ownership of our actions and outcomes, not to assign blame, but to learn, adapt, improve, and move forward.
• Solution‑seeking – focusing on constructive ways forward, even when things are tough.
• Collaboration – sharing ideas, supporting one another, and celebrating collective success.

What You Can Expect from Us

• Competitive salary
• Work hybrid in our Canary Wharf office with an option to work 1–2 days per week from home
• 33 days holiday (including UK public holidays)
• Team get‑togethers
• A paid day off on your birthday
• Office equipment when you join
• Pension contribution
• Be part of one of the UK’s most ambitious HealthTech start‑ups

Our Hiring Process

• Application review
• Introductory screening call
• First‑stage interview
• Final‑stage interview
• Offer

Apply with Confidence. Studies show that men apply for roles when they meet around 60% of the qualifications, whereas women and other marginalised groups often apply only if they meet every requirement. If you believe you’re a great fit but don’t meet every single requirement, we encourage you to apply! At Care ADHD, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive environment. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, especially those from historically marginalised communities, as we work together to create a more equitable future.