System Discharge Lead

Job summary

The system discharge lead is an innovative post for Sheffield which works on behalf of both the Chief Operating Officer for Sheffield Teaching Hospital and the Executive Director of Health and Wellbeing (DASS) for Sheffield City Council. The post has a strategic remit across the entirety of the hospital discharge process including acute, community, adult social care and mental health, working to the best practice recommendations set out in the hospital discharge and community support guidance and achieving excellence in mental health discharge.

With a clear focus on improving outcomes for people in hospital and their family and friend carers, the System Discharge Lead will ensure processes are in place to facilitate people being discharged on the correct pathway at the right time developing systems and ways of working which reduce delays and improve patient outcomes and experience.

This post is a partnership post, and the expectation would be to interact with, and lead within, all system partners. In performing this system leadership role, it is a requirement to develop a shared system view of discharge, and to hold stakeholders to account, driving forward the actions that need to be taken as a system, to address shared challenges. This post will also work closely with the existing approaches to support admission avoidance.

Main duties of the job

The primary functions of this role are:

The oversight and co-ordination of discharge arrangements for all people in adult acute and mental health community bedded units in Sheffield who have been identified as requiring care and support to facilitate their safe and timely discharge.

Delivery, coordination and oversight of the Sheffield Care Transfer Hub and Sheffield Digital Discharge Tool across acute and mental health services.

Strategic support across physical health and mental health discharge arrangements to support a One Sheffield approach to discharge.

Escalating as necessary to the relevant Executive Leads for the provider Trust, ICB and Local Authority.

This post is an innovative system post building on the well established working relationships across the Sheffield Place Integrated Care Board, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (an integrated Community and Acute Trust), Sheffield Health and Social Care Foundation Trust and Sheffield City Council. The post holder will ensure engagement with all partners including the voluntary and community sector, primary care and private care providers as well as health and social care organisations are working together.

For 2025/26 there are three key areas of delivery across both our physical and mental health discharge space:

About us

You will be working for an organisation which values and respects all of its staff and the community it serves. The Trust is a leader in the NHS and research sectors and provides excellent benefits for its staff. This includes commitments to professional development but also many policies to support employees in balancing their personal and professional lives.

Improvements in our discharge to assess using our demand and capacity modelling to right-size our capacity and maximise opportunities for rehabilitation, reablement and recovery for people leaving hospital and extend the offer into mental health discharges.

Building on our development of the digital discharge tool to improve system visibility and enable us to better focus our efforts in times of escalation, expanding the data sharing to include acute, community, adult social care and mental health data sets.

Scale up and embed our care transfer-hub test of change to deliver improved discharge coordination across health and social care and use our learning within our physical health space to support similar working practices into mental health discharge.