Associate Director of EPRR in Eastleigh

The holder of this role will take the lead in shaping and strengthening the ICB's emergency preparedness, resilience and response arrangements. They will provide strategic leadership for EPRR, ensuring compliance, driving continuous improvement, leading a specialist team, and offering expert advice during incidents. Working closely with partners across local, regional and national networks, you'll represent the ICB at key forums and step in for the Deputy Director when needed.

Main duties of the job:

• The Associate Director of EPRR provides senior leadership across the Integrated Care Board to ensure statutory compliance with the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) and NHS Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response requirements.
• The role will provide leadership to all the defined elements of the ICB and wider system EPRR programme, ensuring compliance, assurance, programme delivery, and continuous improvement in preparedness and response.
• The postholder acts as a senior subject matter expert, provides strategic advice during incidents, supports the on‑call framework, and deputises for the Deputy Director when required.
• Working through a matrix model, the role manages resilience capability across NHS providers, Local Resilience Forum partners including local authorities, emergency services, voluntary partners and national bodies, ensuring integrated planning, risk management and effective incident response.
• The postholder operates with a high degree of autonomy as the senior EPRR subject matter expert within the function, responsible for interpreting and implementing national EPRR policy across the ICB and wider system, and determining how these are applied in practice.

About us:

Working for NHS Hampshire and Isle of Wight means joining an organisation serving a population of over 1.5 million people, commissioning high quality and timely healthcare. Working with a dynamic and hard‑working team, you will have a very fulfilling work life and be part of a team and an organisation that makes a real difference. As an employer, Hampshire and Isle of Wight ICB offers a range of excellent employment opportunities to new and existing staff. We aim to be a model and inclusive employer by embedding best HR practice to offer good working conditions, fair pay and benefits, and enable a balance between work and personal life. We have a forward thinking and innovative culture which supports new ways of working. We work collaboratively with our partners across the ICS and by working and thinking differently, we can achieve our priorities and our vision for supporting the people of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. We understand our workforce are key to our success and have a people focused approach which supports staff engagement, employee health & wellbeing and learning & development opportunities.

Job responsibilities:

• Leadership and Governance: Lead highly complex elements of the ICB EPRR programme and provide senior support to ICB and ICS governance structures. Provide strategic advice during incident response and assurance processes, including deputising for the Deputy Director when required. Using enhanced risk assessment skills, the post holder will be required to provide evidence‑based recommendations to senior leaders to inform strategic decision‑making and system risk management. Ensure alignment with statutory obligations, NHS planning requirements and system objectives.
• Partnership and Collaborative Working: Working with a highly complex wide range of multi‑agency partners communicating at all levels. Lead collaborative working across providers, LRF partners, LHRP and national teams to ensure consistent system preparedness. Support clinical and operational partners to embed resilience, learning and risk mitigation in service delivery.
• Operational Delivery and Risk Management: Lead long‑term strategic planning and delivery of programme workstreams including planning, training, exercising and business continuity, ensuring arrangements are forward‑looking and aligned to emerging risks and national priorities. Analyse highly complex information from a wide range of partners and ensure it is communicated appropriately to a wide range of stakeholders. Ensure systems for lessons learned, debrief, assurance and improvement are embedded and reported. Produce formal EPRR documentation including compliance of core standards, plans, policies, risk assessments, performance reports and briefing papers. Analyse and present information to inform strategic decisions and escalation.
• Financial and Resource Management: Manage allocated programme budgets and ensure compliant, value‑for‑money delivery. Contribute to business cases, procurement decisions and joint funding bids with system partners.
• People Leadership: Line‑manage and develop members of the EPRR team, supporting capability, performance and professional standards. Promote a collaborative, improvement‑focused culture and transfer specialist knowledge across teams.
• Innovation, Research and Improvement: Review, interpret and update plans, policies and procedures to reflect national policy, good practice and lessons identified, acting as the senior professional lead for EPRR within the function and holding responsibility for implementation across the ICB and system. Undertake audit, benchmarking and evaluation to support continual improvement and system learning.

Person Specification:

Qualifications and/or experience:

• Educated to masters level or able to demonstrate at least 2 years specialist knowledge acquired through substantial senior leadership experience in emergency planning.
• Highly developed knowledge of EPRR, business continuity, incident response and NHS EPRR assurance frameworks developed through substantial exposure in NHS and multi‑agency environments.
• Demonstrable experience leading EPRR workstreams including planning, training, exercising and business continuity.

Skills and abilities:

• Able to lead complex programme delivery, deputise at senior level and provide specialist judgement in uncertain or pressured situations.
• Able to design, deliver and evaluate large‑scale multi‑agency training and exercising programmes.
• Able to coach, mentor and build capability across teams.

Knowledge:

• RR responsibilities under the Civil Contingencies Act and NHS assurance framework.
• Understanding of multi‑agency structures including LRF, LHRP, SCG/TCG, and emergency service partnerships and protocols.
• Knowledge of business continuity methodology and organisational resilience principles.

Communication and interpersonal skills:

• Proven ability to influence, negotiate and secure agreement in highly complex, politically sensitive and multi‑agency system environments, often involving contentious issues, conflicting priorities and significant organisational risk.
• Able to communicate highly complex, sensitive and time‑critical risks, intelligence and decisions to senior leaders across health, local authority and emergency services.
• Able to support high‑pressure incident environments and maintain calm facilitation.

Analytical and problem solving skills:

• Able to assess highly complex, incomplete and sometimes conflicting information to support strategic decision‑making, requiring advanced judgement in uncertain and high‑pressure environments.
• Able to analyse highly complex learning from incidents, debriefs and audit, and convert findings into system‑wide improvement actions.
• Able to identify system risks and escalation triggers.

IT and digital literacy:

• Intermediate digital capability across multiple platforms used for situational awareness, mass notification and command support (e.g., ResilienceDirect, Everbridge, SHREWD).
• Confident with MS Office and virtual collaboration platforms.

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.