Job summary
An opportunity has arisen for a senior role as the Head of System Flow, supporting discharges for the Plymouth area. The post will be based within the community health and social care provider, Livewell Southwest, and will be accountable to the Chief Operating Officers and lead officers from University Hospitals Plymouth, Plymouth City Council and Livewell Southwest.
The role will have oversight of demand and capacity across the health and care system, working across organisational boundaries to achieve good flow and better outcomes for people, promoting patient choice and control over discharge destination and onward care and support, ensuring that all partners involved in the patient journey are focused on enabling people to return home after their stay in acute hospital care.
The successful applicant will have an extensive knowledge of legislation, statutory guidance and best practice in relation to hospital discharge and will have significant operational experience of working within a health and social care system at a senior level and will be able to demonstrate an ability to form effective relationships.
The successful candidate will have an opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of people who need to access urgent care within the Plymouth area and will receive the support of each partner organisation to ensure success.
Main duties of the job
The Head of System Flow is a senior manager who can make operational decisions on behalf of the agencies, to whom the post is accountable to, in the system to facilitate discharges.
The system aim is to create safe levels of capacity and maintain sufficient flow across all areas.
This ensures that patients who need inpatient hospital care are admitted and treated as efficiently as possible and then discharged as soon as possible. Discharge should preferably be to the patients own home or place from which they were admitted.
The primary aim of this post is to drive system wide change in line with existing and future service improvement priorities. As such, the post holder will be accountable for delivering against a set of key improvement and performance metrics, as agreed by the local system.
The post holder will be accountable for ensuring that intermediate care delivery is within budget and will be required to take remedial action to ensure a balanced year end position if required. The budget for this areas of delivery is several million and encompasses intermediate care at home, and in bedded facilities. In achieving a balanced budget, the post holder will need to achieve a low length of stay, with corresponding good outcomes for patients using a reablement and recovery approach to post-hospital care.
All Livewell Southwest staff are expected to able and willing to work across a 7 day service.
Job Share(s) Considered
About us
We are a people business - where every member of staff matters and can make a difference. Patients are at the heart of everything we do. Joining University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust means becoming part of a team of dedicated staff, who are committed to leading the way through innovation, clinical excellence and great customer care. The Trust has great opportunities for career development in a highly progressive working environment. We offer all of this in a vibrant, modern city with a historic reputation for adventure. PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL COMMUNICATION WILL BE ELECTRONIC, PLEASE CHECK YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT REGULARLY. We recognise that work life balance is important for our colleagues and so we invite requests from applicants around less than full time/flexible working for our advertised roles. Please contact the recruiting manager to discuss this prior to your application submission. We commit to giving this full consideration in each case. We encourage people from diverse backgrounds to apply for our roles, as diversity strengthens our teams. It is sometimes necessary to close vacancies before the closing date. If you have not heard from us within 4 weeks of the closing date, please assume that you have not been shortlisted.
This role will be an employee of Livewell, application forms and personal data will be shared between UHP and Livewell for the purposes of this recruitment.
Job description
Job responsibilities
***** For full details regarding the role please see the attached job description and personal specification *****
Job description
Job responsibilities
***** For full details regarding the role please see the attached job description and personal specification *****
Person Specification
Qualifications
Essential
- Educated to masters level or equivalent level of experience of working at a senior level in specialist area.
- Evidence of post qualifying and continuing professional development.
- Member of relevant professional body
Desirable
- Additional advanced leadership and transformation training
- Should have an in depth understanding of the relationship between NHS England and individual provider and commissioning organisations.
- Significant experience of leading system level transformation across a range of programmes.
- Demonstrable experience of undertaking small and large scale transformation across organisations.
Knowledge
Essential
- Advanced theoretical, practical & professional knowledge acquired through degree, supplemented by specialist training to doctorate or equivalent level, management qualification or equivalent, experience.
- Extensive knowledge of specialist areas, acquired through Professional Health or social Care post graduate diploma or training plus further specialist knowledge or experience to masters level equivalent.
- Must have an understanding of the background to and aims of current health & social care policy and appreciate the implications of this on engagement and organisational change.
- Deep understanding of the processes associated with acute and community patient flow in the achievement of quality outcomes and system performance, national innovations and system flow pathways into and out of organisations.
- Programme management or project management qualification.
Personal Skills, abilities & attributes
Essential
- Provide and receive highly complex, sensitive and contentious information, negotiate with senior stakeholders on difficult and controversial issues, and present complex and sensitive information to large and influential groups.
- Provide and receive highly complex, sensitive or contentious information; barriers to understanding; present complex, sensitive or contentious information to large groups/ significant barriers to acceptance; hostile, antagonistic or highly emotive atmosphere.
- Communicates service-related information to executives and senior managers, staff, external agencies (including regulators): requires negotiating, persuasive, motivational, reassurance skills; gives formal presentations at both national and local level, manages and reconcile conflicting views where there are significant barriers to acceptance or understanding.
- Requires negotiating, persuasive, motivational, reassurance skills; Ability to establish mutual trust, through both honesty and integrity. Role model behaviours that inspire, and develop a culture of can do proactivity.
- Able to influence others to achieve the goals, objectives and system requirements.
- Ability to influence at director level enabling changes in service behaviour.
- Ability to negotiate across providers to ensure the best for our patients.
- Ability to influence providers to change clinical and operational behaviours to during periods of escalation thus ensuring flow is maintained.
- Negotiation with providers to ensure operational delivery is focused on system rather than Organisational approach
Additional Requirements
Essential
- Frequently exposed to highly distressing or emotionally challenging circumstances
- Deals with staff problems, patient and carer complaints, service provider escalations and conveys unwelcome news. For example, where performance targets not met, difficult and different decisions and solutions are required re service provision, patient placements and outcomes
- Frequent and prolonged requirement for concentration on investigating problems, analysis of multi-organisational performance data, predicting impact across systems and policies, constant interruptions requiring immediate responses, producing complex reports for presentation/dissemination to multiagency, cross organisational forums
Person Specification
Qualifications
Essential
- Educated to masters level or equivalent level of experience of working at a senior level in specialist area.
- Evidence of post qualifying and continuing professional development.
- Member of relevant professional body
Desirable
- Additional advanced leadership and transformation training
- Should have an in depth understanding of the relationship between NHS England and individual provider and commissioning organisations.
- Significant experience of leading system level transformation across a range of programmes.
- Demonstrable experience of undertaking small and large scale transformation across organisations.
Knowledge
Essential
- Advanced theoretical, practical & professional knowledge acquired through degree, supplemented by specialist training to doctorate or equivalent level, management qualification or equivalent, experience.
- Extensive knowledge of specialist areas, acquired through Professional Health or social Care post graduate diploma or training plus further specialist knowledge or experience to masters level equivalent.
- Must have an understanding of the background to and aims of current health & social care policy and appreciate the implications of this on engagement and organisational change.
- Deep understanding of the processes associated with acute and community patient flow in the achievement of quality outcomes and system performance, national innovations and system flow pathways into and out of organisations.
- Programme management or project management qualification.
Personal Skills, abilities & attributes
Essential
- Provide and receive highly complex, sensitive and contentious information, negotiate with senior stakeholders on difficult and controversial issues, and present complex and sensitive information to large and influential groups.
- Provide and receive highly complex, sensitive or contentious information; barriers to understanding; present complex, sensitive or contentious information to large groups/ significant barriers to acceptance; hostile, antagonistic or highly emotive atmosphere.
- Communicates service-related information to executives and senior managers, staff, external agencies (including regulators): requires negotiating, persuasive, motivational, reassurance skills; gives formal presentations at both national and local level, manages and reconcile conflicting views where there are significant barriers to acceptance or understanding.
- Requires negotiating, persuasive, motivational, reassurance skills; Ability to establish mutual trust, through both honesty and integrity. Role model behaviours that inspire, and develop a culture of can do proactivity.
- Able to influence others to achieve the goals, objectives and system requirements.
- Ability to influence at director level enabling changes in service behaviour.
- Ability to negotiate across providers to ensure the best for our patients.
- Ability to influence providers to change clinical and operational behaviours to during periods of escalation thus ensuring flow is maintained.
- Negotiation with providers to ensure operational delivery is focused on system rather than Organisational approach
Additional Requirements
Essential
- Frequently exposed to highly distressing or emotionally challenging circumstances
- Deals with staff problems, patient and carer complaints, service provider escalations and conveys unwelcome news. For example, where performance targets not met, difficult and different decisions and solutions are required re service provision, patient placements and outcomes
- Frequent and prolonged requirement for concentration on investigating problems, analysis of multi-organisational performance data, predicting impact across systems and policies, constant interruptions requiring immediate responses, producing complex reports for presentation/dissemination to multiagency, cross organisational forums
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.
Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).
From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).
Additional information
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.
Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).
From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).
