Job Introduction
At HCRG Care Group, we believe that the quality of clinical leadership is the single greatest driver of safe, outstanding services. We are looking for an experienced, credible and inspiring nurse leader to join us as Deputy Director of Nursing for our B&NES, Swindon and Wiltshire (BSW) Business Unit, a role of genuine influence, strategic reach and clinical impact at a pivotal time for our services.
As the most senior nursing leader in BSW, you will be the professional voice for nursing and AHP colleagues across the business unit. You will be a core member of the BSW Senior Leadership Team, operating as a strategic partner to the Chief Nursing Officer and Regional Director, and providing the kind of visible, accessible clinical leadership that our services and our colleagues deserve.
This is not a desk-based role. We expect you to be a familiar, trusted presence across our BSW services, visible to the full range of colleagues, including those working nights, weekends and in community settings. You will have full autonomy over how you organise your diary to make that happen, but we would expect a commitment of three to four days on-site each week across the BSW footprint. You can be based anywhere within BSW.
No two weeks will look the same. You may spend a morning with a community nursing team in Swindon, an afternoon in Bath at a quality assurance review, and the following morning providing written assurance to the CNO on a clinical issue. You will thrive here if you lead with warmth and authority in equal measure, and if you are genuinely energised by the scale and diversity of what community health can achieve.
If you are a senior nurse leader with the clinical credibility, operational grip and emotional intelligence to shape culture across a large and complex business unit. If that sounds like you, this is your opportunity
Package Description
As Deputy Director of Nursing – BSW, you’ll be part of our senior clinical leadership team at HCRG Care Group. You will feel genuinely valued in this role, with access to exclusive rewards and benefits including:
- NHS Agenda for Change Band 8c salary with an NHS pension
- Membership of My Reward Hub, giving you discounts on everyday purchases, plus cashback and voucher offers for treats and essentials
- Access to your wages as you earn them, helping cover life’s emergencies and avoid overdraft fees or high-interest borrowing
- Online and in-person wellbeing support, including mental health services, activity challenges, financial wellbeing tools, coaching and counselling
- Access to e-learning, bespoke career pathways and professional development opportunities through our ‘Outstanding’ Learning Enterprise team
- An open, just culture where you’re encouraged to contribute ideas, backed by ringfenced innovation funding each year
- The pride of working for an organisation where the majority of our rated services hold ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ ratings from the Care Quality Commission
Main Responsibilities
As Deputy Director of Nursing – BSW, you will be accountable for senior clinical leadership across the full breadth of our BSW services. This means much more than overseeing governance frameworks: being the person that colleagues, managers and commissioners look to when they need a senior clinical voice, a trusted advocate for safe practice, or a leader who will make difficult decisions with care and confidence.
Visible Leadership and Professional Voice
You will lead through presence. With a structured programme of site visits and service engagement, shaped around you and planned to reach colleagues across all shifts, settings and working patterns, you will build the kind of relationships that make clinical leadership real rather than theoretical. You will chair or co-chair professional nursing and AHP forums across BSW, represent the business unit at organisational and system-level forums, and set the standard for how clinical leadership looks and feels in HCRG Care Group. Colleagues should know your name, see your face, and feel that you genuinely care about their work.
Clinical Governance and Quality Improvement
Working closely with the BSW quality team, you will oversee the implementation of HCRG Care Group’s clinical governance framework across the business unit, ensuring compliance with CQC requirements, statutory obligations and organisational policy. You will take personal accountability for ensuring that all Internal Service Reviews are completed rigorously, with clear and time-bound action plans, and that the clinical elements of those plans are followed through to completion. You will provide written assurance to the CNO and Regional Director on clinical risk, quality concerns and inspection readiness, and where things go wrong you will lead the learning agenda, coaching Registered Managers, driving genuine improvement and making sure the organisation learns as well as acts.
Clinical Transformation and Service Redesign
Every significant change programme in BSW will have your clinical leadership running through it. You will lead clinical involvement and engagement across all transformation and redesign activity, including the implementation of ETOC, delivery of PNA and restorative supervision, and other priority programmes, ensuring that clinical decision-making and assurance is embedded throughout delivery, not bolted on at the end. You will sign off EQIAs, QIAs and clinical validations before implementation, approve clinical workforce model changes in partnership with Finance and Operations, and hold delegated authority for research governance approvals across BSW.
Safe Staffing and Workforce Sustainability
You will lead BSW’s approach to safe staffing, ensuring that staffing models across every service reflect contractual requirements, professional standards and genuine clinical safety, taking into account acuity, dependency, clinical outcomes, incidents, affordability and colleague feedback. You will approve establishment reviews with rigour and professional judgement, and will oversee the safe deployment of ACP, Consultant Practitioner and other advanced practice roles. Working closely with The Learning Enterprise, you will ensure that colleagues across BSW have access to the training, competency frameworks and development pathways they need to practise safely and grow in their careers.
Talent Development and the Nursing Workforce Agenda
You will lead the professional nursing and AHP workforce agenda for BSW, from education and competency through to revalidation, career pathways and talent pipeline development. You will build the next generation of clinical leaders in BSW, ensuring strong succession for senior and hard-to-recruit roles, and you will champion clinicians’ active engagement in HCRG Care Group’s Striving For Better networks, enabling colleagues to contribute to practice development and act as expert resources across the organisation.
Regulatory Responsibility and Colleague Culture
You will support the Chief Nursing Officer in discharging responsibilities for Infection Prevention and Control and Safeguarding and will lead or oversee investigations into significant incidents or concerns about professional performance where appropriate. Beyond regulation, you will be a genuine champion for colleague culture, modelling and living our values of Care, Think and Do, ensuring colleagues feel recognised and valued for exceptional practice, and driving meaningful improvements in engagement, experience and retention within BSW’s clinical workforce.
Person Requirements
To succeed in this role, you will bring:
- Active NMC registration as a Registered Nurse, educated to Master’s level
- Deep and proven clinical and operational leadership experience in a complex, diverse healthcare setting, with the credibility to operate confidently at senior organisational and system level
- A track record of leading large, multidisciplinary clinical teams through senior managers, with experience of building capability, inspiring great people and holding leaders to account with both challenge and genuine support
- Strong knowledge and practical experience of clinical governance, CQC frameworks, safeguarding and statutory regulatory requirements
- Experience leading clinical transformation, service redesign and workforce change programmes that have delivered measurable improvements in quality and safety
- The ability to build trusted relationships across a complex system, including commissioners, NHS and local authority partners, and frontline clinical teams alike
- High levels of emotional intelligence, resilience and sound judgement, with the confidence to make decisions in a fast-paced environment with competing priorities and stakeholder demands
- Commercial awareness and an understanding of operating within a contract-based, multi-commissioner service environment
- A values-driven leadership approach genuinely aligned to Care, Think and Do
Desirable:
- Experience outside an NHS provider, bringing a broader commercial perspective to clinical leadership
About The Company
We change lives by transforming health and care.
Established in 2006, we are one of the UK's leading independent providers of community health and care services, working with health and care commissioners and communities to transform services with a focus on experience, efficiency, and improved outcomes. We deliver and transform adult and children community health services, primary care services including urgent care, sexual health, dermatology and MSK services as well as adult social care and wellbeing services. Across England, we support communities of many millions and directly help more than half a million people each year - guided by our simple values: we care, we think, we do.
We're committed to equal opportunities and welcome applications from a broad, diverse range of people who want to join our team. We’re a Disability Confident Committed company, so we work to provide facilities, work environment adjustments and technical solutions to be as inclusive of everyone.
While it doesn’t happen often, sometimes a role is very popular, and we’ll need to close it earlier than the date we’ve shown here. If you’re keen to join our team, we’d love to hear from you so please apply as soon as you can.
As you’d expect, safeguarding and protecting the children, young people and vulnerable adults that we work with is of the utmost importance so we have policies and procedures in place to promote safeguarding and safer working practices and everyone who joins the team is subject to a safer recruitment process, including the disclosure of criminal records and vetting checks.
Finally, we need to let you know that the company you’ll work for is part of HCRG Care Group Holdings Limited and by applying for this job we’ll need to process and hold information about you. If you would like to know a little more about how we use your information, please see our website's privacy policy
