About this role
Job summary
The Clinical Quality Lead reports directly to the Associate Director of Clinical Services and is responsible for the development, implementation, and management of quality assurance and improvement strategies to ensure compliance, transparency, and accountability across our Hospice clinical services.
Main duties of the job
Reporting to the Associate Director of Clinical Services the post holder is a member of the clinical leadership team and will play a key role in fostering a culture of continuous improvement, regulatory standards compliance, and excellence in patient outcomes.
Working with others the post holder will ensure a robust approach to quality, governance, and assurance, including patient experience, clinical effectiveness, clinical risk management, patient safety, audits, and quality improvement in line with the St Giles Hospice values and culture.
This role will also support the Information Governance requirements for the organisation, and will assume lead responsibilities supporting the Caldicott Guardian, Data Protection and Freedom of Information processes.
About us
St Giles Hospice is a registered charity founded in 1983 by the Reverend Paul Brothwell, originally to improve the care of local people dying with cancer.
We now support patients, and their loved ones, living with a terminal illness. Our dedicated team provides individually-tailored care, free of charge, either at the hospice or in patients own homes across our communities.
We spend close to £10 million a year providing our specialist services. With just 18% of this funded by the Government, we rely heavily on donations and income generation from the local community.
Job description Job responsibilities
Leadership and management:
Support the Associate Director of Clinical Services through continuous development, maintenance, and delivery of a comprehensive strategy for quality which considers patient safety, risk management, clinical effectiveness, and patient experience.
Provide highly visible accessible leadership, advice and support on issues relating to safe and compassionate nursing care, ensuring the provision of evidence-based practice.
Support the senior management team and the senior clinical team, ensuring that services are developed around patient needs, that they are accessible and seamless.
Contribute to the annual integrated governance work programme and monitoring framework in line with the Hospice clinical strategy, assurance framework, risk register and Quality Account priorities as well as all Care Quality Commission aspects of business.
Provide support to the Clinical Quality and Governance Team, ensuring robust systems, processes, and work programs are in-place for the delivery of safe services and effective risk management, in accordance with national and local guidance/policies.
Patient safety:
Responsible for ensuring robust systems for the effective reporting, investigation and learning from patient safety incidents, working in-line with the Patient Safety Investigation Response Framework (PSIRF).
Where directed lead the investigation of serious incidents using appropriate methodology across the Hospice as appropriate. This will include speaking to patients and family members, to gather highly complex, sensitive information that will inform the investigation.
Support the Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) program to ensure we are always fully compliant with the law and statutory standards.
Ensure robust arrangements are in place for safeguarding adults and children and liaising where appropriate with the safeguarding leads.
To provide advice and support to complex and high-risk cases from a quality and safety lens.
Clinical effectiveness:
Support highly effective and responsive arrangements for reviewing, measuring and responding to recommendations arising from audit, complaints, and incidents and ensure progress is made in respect to those recommendations and that learning can be evidenced as an outcome.
To support the Hospices participation and reporting in all clinical effectiveness work streams, including clinical audit programmes, benchmarking projects, NICE implementation, key performance indicators and quality improvement programmes.
Working with the Associate Director of Clinical Services and Head of Clinical Operations in the coordination and collation of data, information, and examples of good practice to showcase on behalf of the Hospices reporting requirements, including the Hospices annual Quality Account.
The ability to maintain a positive, supportive relationship with all services to ensure key messages are not ignored or dismissed, which could ultimately impact on patient care, staff safety and the Hospice reputation.
Support the Hospices compliance of the Care Quality Commission
Develop, review and update local policies and procedures related to quality, safety and information governance.
Maintain awareness of up-to-date professional and clinical practice issues and ensure that appropriate national policy is reflected in practice.
Patient and family experience:
To ensure we have safe and appropriate systems and processes to respond and manage complaints for the clinical services; as well as coordinating learning from these complaints.
Support and develop mechanisms for capturing and acting upon patient and family feedback.
To ensure any recommendations arising from complaints or patient experience feedback are implemented.
To ensure that any issues arising from complaints or patient experience feedback are appropriately escalated within the Hospice, both in terms of the nature of the concern and failure to manage the concern effectively.
To support investigation leads within the Hospice to complete robust case assessment and investigation as required.
To support facilitation of desktop review and after-action reviews within the Hospice as required.
To monitor trends and themes in patient experience reporting, feedback types and lessons learned, identifying any areas for actions, and working with clinical leads to formulate measures required to address any patterns identified.
Ensure that any necessary responses/information relating to patient experience is provided to external agencies (including ICB, the CQC and the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman).
Service improvement:
To coordinate and support a calendar of clinical audit projects, which reflect governance and service improvement priorities.
To facilitate a pro-active learning culture amongst staff and to seek innovative and responsive ways in which this can be fostered.
To support the delivery of incident learning from serious incidents and complaints to teams within the Hospice.
To deliver learning taken from patient experience feedback both from individual cases and themes/trends.
To work with corporate services where required to triangulate data and produce reports for internal use and for external partners.
Lead the initiation and oversight of Quality Improvement projects with data analysis and PDSA cycles where appropriate.
Identify training needs related to quality and safety and coordinate relevant training programs.
Communication, information collection and analysis:
Demonstrate excellent presentation, facilitation, influencing and coaching skills, adapting approach and language to optimise impact of communication in a range of situations and settings.
To contribute to the development and implementation of IT systems and processes, to support managerial and clinical activity.
Monitoring the processing of data and information within agreed timescales.
To support the production of reports related to service activity and outcomes against mandated standards, NICE guidelines, and local service agreements.
To embed clinical governance, safety, and quality into everyday practice to ensure that clinical governance is everyones business, linking in with corporate governance and clinical leads across the organisation to share best practice and learn from incidents.
To advise on potential clinical governance and information governance risks and be pro-active in the potential mitigation of the identified risks.
To work with the Associate Director of Clinical Services and support preparations for inspection and review visits by external monitoring bodies including the Care Quality Commission, which will include the gathering, analysing, interpreting, and presenting extensive and complex data and information.
To ensure a proactive role in seeking out different styles and methods of communication and producing accurate and complete records of communications, consistent with legislation, policies, and procedures.
There is a requirement to produce reports and learning materials that are perceptible, easily read, and comprehensible.Information Governance:
Provide advice and guidance to staff on data protection. information security and records management matters. Support and advise on information security aspects of projects and new initiatives. Ensure that appropriate technical and organisational controls are in place to safeguard personal data. Support the completion of Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) and providing advice on information security risk mitigations. Lead the submission and completion of the Data Protection and Security Toolkit. Work with the Cyber Security lead to ensure that systems used for processing personal data are compliant by design and by default. Monitoring compliance with information governance policies and report on risks, issues and improvements. Promote a culture of data protection and privacy awareness, including contributing to training initiatives. Escalate to the SIRO and/or Caldicott Guardian when required. Ensuring the organisation processes the personal data of its data subjects in compliance with the applicable laws and data protection principles.Personal and people development:
To work with the wider leadership team to successfully implement the people and organisational development aspects of our strategy. To support staff training needs including on investigations, Duty of Candour, and risk management
Training and development:
To support the development and implementation of the Hospice education, learning and development strategy which supports our strategic plan, maintains operational effectiveness, and facilitates professional development, both for clinical and non-clinical teams. To support the development and involvement of users and carers contribution to the clinical governance and information governance agenda and related activity. To network internally and externally to ensure the Hospice is kept up to date with developments within the clinical governance agenda.
Just so you know:
We may review applications before the application review date, however, if you apply after the application review date, your application may not be considered. We will accept applications until we have successfully filled the role, this may be earlier than the closing date.
If you have not heard within 14 days of the application close date, then please consider that your application has been unsuccessful at this time.
As part of your application your data will be managed in line with St Giles Hospice Privacy Policy and kept for 6 months. If you would like to see this in full, please visit https://www.stgileshospice.com/privacy-policy/
Person Specification
Values Essential
Exhibits our hospice values and behaviours
Qualifications Essential
Qualified and registered clinical professional NMC, HCPC etc. Masters degree or equivalent experience, which can be evidenced. Evidence of continuing personal and professional development in quality (CPD).
Desirable
Non-medical prescriber to V300 qualification. Post graduate qualification in relevant subject. Trained in QI methodology.
Experience Essential
Previous experience managing, leading, supporting, and supervising staff and teams. Previous experience of and proven ability to produce and create letters, reports, recording systems. Proven high degree of accuracy and attention to detail. Proven ability to analyse complex data to recognise themes and trends to identify risks and areas for improvement and to be able to act upon this as required. Proven experience of communicating clearly, concisely, and articulately at all levels, including service users and carers, all staff within clinical teams, peers, corporate departments, and external agencies. Knowledge of quality assurance methodologies, clinical governance, and regulatory requirements in healthcare. Experience of managing, coordinating, and leading on patient safety investigations, service user, carer, and other complaints. Coordinating and leading on preparation and readiness for internal audits and external inspections and for identifying and supporting development and action plans post audit/inspection. Experience of organisational skills and experience of balancing competing needs and delegating where appropriate. Demonstrable experience of facilitating skills training. Previous experience in presenting information to a wider audience using appropriate presentation packages. Previous experience of managing confidential and sensitive information in an appropriate and professional manner. Previous experience of demonstrating the need for discretion when dealing with public and professionals and in the management of highly sensitive information. Experience of recognising patient and team/service priorities and take timely and appropriate action
Desirable
Proven experience of conducting a research project. Experience and/or understanding of the charity sector including: the role and relationship with the Board of Trustees; charity funding and the importance of income generation; the role and importance of our volunteers.
Other requirements Essential
Valid driving licence Eligibility to work in the UK Please note that St Giles Hospice does not hold a sponsorship licence and is therefore unable to accept sponsorship requests
Skills Essential
Advocate for outstanding patient care and quality of service. Demonstrable knowledge and experience of governance processes. Demonstrable knowledge and experience of policies, including the ability to interpret a broad range of policies and procedures to make recommendations to services. Knowledge of standards for quality care pathways applicable to Hospice services including NICE guidance and legal frameworks. Demonstrable analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to make decisions by determining key points from complex and multiple information strands. Demonstrable ability to concentrate for long periods for example on report writing, analysis of information. Demonstrable experience of using and manipulating information for effective management. Ability to adapt, work flexibly and within deadlines. Proven experience of managing sensitive and difficult situations, incidents, and complaints, effectively and diplomatically.
Personal attributes Essential
Resilient and adaptable, with the ability to thrive in a dynamic and challenging environment. High level of integrity and professionalism. Proactive and innovative, with a passion for continuous improvement. Ambassador for St Giles Hospice
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.
UK Registration
Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).
Employer details Employer name St Giles Hospice
Address Fisherwick Road
Whittington
Lichfield
Staffordshire
WS14 9LH
Employer's website https://www.stgileshospice.com/ (Opens in a new tab)