Job responsibilities
Job overview
The Lead Midwife for Patient Safety & Quality role is integral to coordinating and developing clinical governance within the maternity service. The postholder will support the Director of Midwifery, Gynaecology and Assistant Chief Nurse and the Head of Women’s Health Governance and Assurance in ensuring delivery of high-quality care and robust governance frameworks. As an integral member of the Women’s Health clinical governance team, the role contributes to sharing learning, implementing change and quality improvement projects.
The postholder will be passionate about driving improvement within the service and have an excellent working knowledge of current clinical guidelines, with the ability to apply evidence-based practice to incident and risk management processes. This specialist role requires strong organisational and communication skills and an ability to manage a complex workload, alongside line management and manager on-call responsibilities.
Main duties of the job
- Supporting the delivery of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) within Women’s Health (WH).
- Overseeing the Maternity Risk Register.
- Supporting and advising on quality issues, patient safety, and clinical governance and risk management to all clinical staff.
- Coordinating, facilitating and supporting the WH MDT in working towards achieving and maintaining CQC Standards and evidencing safety actions for the Maternity Incentive Scheme.
- Producing reports, chairing meetings, tracking all aspects of governance within Maternity, and ensuring governance frameworks are maintained and updated.
The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT) is proud to care for the communities of West Essex, delivering safe, compassionate, and high-quality services. We are part of the Neighbourhood Wave - a national programme that’s changing how care is delivered by focusing on prevention, early support, and more joined-up services across health, social care, and the voluntary sector.
This means we’re working more closely with local partners to bring care closer to home and support people to live healthier, more independent lives.
We’re a supportive and inclusive organisation that values its people. We offer development opportunities, flexible working, and a strong focus on wellbeing. As a Disability Confident and equal opportunities employer, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and experiences.
Join us and help shape the future of care in West Essex.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
To support the senior leadership team for Women’s Health to deliver the Clinical Governance and Risk Management Strategy.
The postholder will be responsible for:
- Supporting the delivery of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) within Women’s Health (WH). This includes overseeing Maternity investigations including but not limited to Patient Safety Incident Investigations (PSIIs), After Action Reviews (AARs) and incident reviews; ensuring prompt reporting; supporting the WH multidisciplinary team (MDT) in undertaking reviews; implementing learning; and tracking/progressing actions.
- Overseeing the Maternity Risk Register, ensuring regular review and supporting progress on actions.
- Disseminating alerts (ISB/MDA/MHRA) to managers and relevant teams and monitoring actions required in response to these.
- As a member of the WH clinical governance team, jointly monitoring the incident reporting system, providing support to the WH MDT in response to incidents and external alerts.
- Coordinating, facilitating and supporting the WH MDT in working towards achieving and maintaining CQC Standards and evidencing safety actions for the Maternity Incentive Scheme.
- Supporting and advising on quality issues, patient safety, and clinical governance and risk management to all clinical staff. This involves working closely with the WH clinical governance team to achieve service-wide learning and improvements. This includes contributing to departmental newsletters, presentations at learning forums and meetings, delivering MDT teaching, updating and creating guidelines and patient information leaflets and attending safety huddles.
- Supporting the WH MDT with complaints and PALS responses and assisting the legal team with investigations and claims as required.
- Producing reports, chairing meetings, tracking all aspects of governance within Maternity, and ensuring governance frameworks are maintained and updated. This requires close working with the corporate patient safety team and other Trust PSQ leads.
- Identifying and escalating incident and PALS trends, supporting learning and quality improvement work to address these, and ensuring the risk register reflects trends.
- Deputise for the Head of Women’s Health Governance and Assurance at relevant Trust meetings.
- Undertaking Duty of Candour and ensuring the process is monitored and the service is compliant.
- Provides cover for when other members of the Clinical Governance team are absent – e.g. the Lead Nurse for Patient Safety and Quality (gynaecology) and the Lead Midwife for Quality and Compliance.
- Assist the Head of Women’s Health Governance and Assurance in providing assurance for the Maternity (Perinatal) Incentive Scheme, Saving Babies Lives’ Care Bundle, Maternal Care Bundle, and recommendations from national maternity reviews such as Ockenden.
Please see supporting documents for full job description and person specification.
