UHN Patient safety incident response lead in Northampton

The Patient Safety Incident Response Lead holds a critical position within the Trust, ensuring a comprehensive and proactive approach to patient safety in line with both national and local regulatory requirements. The postholder will provide expert leadership in the effective management, investigation, and learning from patient safety incidents, with particular emphasis on full implementation and adherence to the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). This includes ensuring that all incident response processes are compliant with PSIRF principles, such as a just culture, transparency, and a focus on systemic improvement, and that these are consistently applied across UHN.

The postholder will be responsible for reviewing, standardising, and embedding robust incident reporting and management processes throughout the organisation, ensuring alignment with PSIRF, NHS England guidance, and Trust policies. This will involve working collaboratively with key stakeholders to oversee the timely review of patient safety events by the Incident Review Group (IRG), ensuring that reviews are conducted in a fair, thorough, and non-punitive manner, and that the patient voice is integral to all stages of the process.

Main duties of the job include providing both strategic and operational leadership to the Sepsis and Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) Practitioner Team, driving improvements in clinical practice and patient outcomes. The postholder will be responsible for ensuring that learning from incidents is translated into sustainable improvements and that compliance with statutory and regulatory duties, including the Duty of Candour, is maintained at all times. The Patient Safety Incident Response Lead will also be expected to monitor and report on compliance with PSIRF and other regulatory frameworks, support the preparation for external inspections or audits, and contribute to the ongoing development of a culture of safety and continuous improvement within the Trust.

Job responsibilities include:

• Leading and overseeing the Trust's patient safety incident response processes, ensuring all incidents are managed in a timely, thorough, and effective manner in accordance with the NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), national guidance, and statutory regulations.
• Leading and coordinating the alignment of patient safety investigation processes, frameworks, and standards across UHN.
• Facilitating collaboration and sharing of best practice to ensure unified approaches to investigation, learning, and improvement.
• Ensuring robust systems are in place for the investigation, reporting, and learning from incidents, with particular emphasis on statutory reporting to regulatory bodies such as the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and NHS England.
• Communicating and delivering the Patient Safety Incident Response Plan ensuring systems are in place for effective delivery.
• Identifying, assessing and mitigating risks to the delivery of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework.
• Providing patient safety expertise/leadership within the organisation, demonstrating compassionate leadership, visibility and supporting the continued development of the patient safety culture.
• Promoting patient safety thinking as an approach that incorporates learning from incidents as well as all other outcomes including routine performance, good performance, near misses etc.
• Maintaining a high level of preparedness for CQC or other external reviews by ensuring comprehensive documentation, accessible evidence of incident management processes, and a clear audit trail of actions taken.
• Overseeing the analysis of complex patient safety and incident data, using advanced methodologies to identify key themes, trends, and outliers.
• Preparing and presenting comprehensive, data-driven reports for internal governance groups, the Board, and external stakeholders, including regulators and commissioners, ensuring statutory reporting requirements are met.
• Supporting responses to patient safety incidents, ensuring adherence to national policy and guidance enabling timely reporting and facilitating multi-agency reviews where required.

Person Specification:

Essential qualifications include:

• Educated to Masters level (in a relevant discipline) or equivalent experience of working at a senior level.
• Post-graduate management, leadership or specialist qualification or previous experience.
• Registered Healthcare Professional (NMC, GMC, HCPC, GPhC).
• Quality improvement qualification or previous experience.

Essential knowledge and experience include:

• Experience of working in a patient safety-related role with an understanding of the principles that underpin approaches to improving patient safety in health systems.
• Experience of working in a strategic leadership role supporting Board Executives.
• Knowledge of the NHS patient safety strategy and how it can be implemented.
• Experience in project/change management in a healthcare environment.

Essential skills include:

• Ability to interpret complex information that may conflict and where expert opinion may differ.
• Ability to communicate effectively with clinical, academic and all levels of staff.
• Ability to develop and maintain collaborative relationships.
• High level analytical skills and the ability to draw qualitative and quantitative data from a wide range of sources.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and will require a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.