Specialist Advisor – Doctor Consultant – Obstetrics

Location: National

Daily rate: £300 (£268 day rate + £32/day holiday pay)

Ad-Hoc: As and when required

Closing Date: Friday 20th March 2026 at 11.59pm

Are you committed to helping us regulate health and social care within England? The CQC is looking for senior clinicians with experience of clinical management/governance process to work with us as Specialty Advisor supporting our inspectors in their work through your informed insight, knowledge and experience of working within maternity services. We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, equitable, high-quality care and encourage services to improve.

We are looking for people who are caring, demonstrate integrity, aspire to excellence, committed to equitable and inclusive services and care and work well as part of a team to join with us and share in this sense of achievement.

If you would like to help us make a positive impact to health and social care within England and deliver a service of excellence to the public then read on.

Why this could be a great role for you…

You will have an opportunity to contribute to ensuring that maternity services and care provided to women and their families are safe, compassionate and effective and are led by clinicians with the required skills, approach, infrastructure and outcomes. You will gain valuable insight into how maternity services are assessed and be exposed to varying degrees of and examples of best practice and approaches to improve areas for development that might provide you with useful insights as an experienced clinician and for your own service.

What you will bring…

Expertise as an Obstetric Consultant, experience and understanding of what is necessary to ensure safe care is paramount to ensure that women and their families receive high quality care in the right place at the right time, and delivered by staff equipped to provide safe, dignified and compassionate care. This includes the opportunities, challenges, statutory requirements and insight from experiences of both staff and people who use services and what is needed to ensure safe, good quality equitable care.

Because you will be operating as a consultant, you will contribute to inspection teams inspiring confidence in provider organisations that the inspection team have the required level of seniority and expertise to undertake effective assessments of equity, equality, diversity and inclusion within our assessment framework.

Finally, most importantly you will bring an understanding of the diversity of lived experiences of both staff, people who use services and their families that should inform our understanding of the culture in which services and care are provided. This includes demonstrated awareness and understanding of intersectionality of oppressions.

For an informal discussion or further information about this role, please contact Victoria Head via email at Victoria.Head@cqc.org.uk.

Please note this role is subject to a satisfactory DBS check.

Being a Specialist Advisor

This role can be undertaken as either a Casual Worker, paid directly to a personal bank account by the CQC for attending in your own time (non-working days, annual leave) or as a seconded position if your service is registered with the CQC and agrees to the secondment. Seconded SpA's organisations agree in principle that their employees can attend CQC inspections and the seconded SpA seeks their line manager's permission to take leave to attend individual inspections, which can last from one to three days. The seconded SpA's organisation then invoices the CQC for the time the SpA spent away from their substantive role.

You will be offered opportunities to support inspection with 6 weeks’ notice whenever possible, however, you will also be contacted for more short notice support on occasions. You are under no obligation to accept an inspection should it be offered and it not be convenient for you. We are not able to guarantee you a set number of inspection opportunities in a one year period. You may be offered one a month or one in the whole year depending on the focus of the inspection programme. If appointed, as a Specialist Advisor you will be expected to commit to at least 2 inspections per year.

If successful at interview we aim to conclude your pre‑engagement checks within a 6‑8 week window, please complete all forms and take actions to assist the team in achieving this. You will be provided with a dedicated onboarding peer who will support you in completing pre‑engagement checks and will be on hand to answer any questions you have. You will be required to have a current DBS certificate under 3 years old and we require references going back three years. If you've been with the same employer for three years’ then we'll only require one reference.

Eligibility to work

If you are successful at interview, CQC will need to verify your right to work in the UK using digital identity verification. Details of how to complete the right to work check will be provided as part of the conditional offer of employment. If we are unable to verify your right to work digitally, we are required to complete this face to face at one of our CQC Offices. Please be aware that we are unable to progress any offer of employment until right to work in the UK is confirmed. We will require all successful applicants to be active in Professional Practice.

Individual Adjustments…

We are committed to being open and transparent around our processes and we endeavour to offer every candidate the opportunity to perform at their best throughout the recruitment process. We seek to support candidates to identify potential challenges and work with them to identify and facilitate individual adjustments as appropriate. Should you require assistance and/or would like to request an adjustment at any stage of the recruitment process, please contact a member of the team via email: temprecruitment@cqc.org.uk.