Job summary
- Main area
- Leadership
- Grade
- Band 9
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week
- Job ref
- 225-COPR-7773152
- Employer
- The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- New Cross Hospital
- Town
- Wolverhampton
- Salary
- £109,179 - £125,637 per annum
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 15/02/2026 23:59
- Interview date
- 24/02/2026
Employer heading
Director of Improvement
Band 9
Job overview
Are you an ambitious and effective senior leader who can inspire and motivate teams to deliver results?
Do you have experience implementing a QMS within a provider Trust?
The Royal Wolverhampton and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trusts operate as a Group, working together to strengthen services, improve outcomes, and deliver consistent, high‑quality care for our communities.
We are seeking a Director of Improvement to make a genuine difference and drive meaningful change. You will have significant demonstrable experience and a proven track record of successful implementation of a QMS, preferable with a provider Trust. You will lead the development and delivery of organisation‑wide continuous improvement culture and fundamental change.
As a key member of the senior leadership team, the postholder will work in close partnership with Executive, senior leadership colleagues across the HR function and operational leaders to weave improvement capability into the fabric of the organisation's culture, values and daily practices.
The postholder will ensure the Group’s comprehensive improvement system aligns strategic priorities with daily operational practices, ensuring measurable improvements in patient care, staff experience, and organisational performance.
Main duties of the job
- Strategic Leadership: Develop and execute strategies that ensure leadership models and development reflect a continuous improvement approach enabling staff-led problem solving and innovation.
- Collaborating to embed improvement: Partner with Organisational Development and Workforce teams to integrate improvement capability into leadership development, talent management, and succession planning.
- Improvement System Development: Work with operational leadership to establish and evolve the Trust’s Management system, connecting corporate strategy to frontline delivery through robust governance and balanced metrics
- Cultural transformation: Working with leadership teams to ensure the promotion and role modelling of improvement behaviours and implementation of processes and artefacts that consistently signal the desired culture.
- Staff engagement: Design and implement engagement strategies that set expectations about staff responsibilities to improve, inspire staff participation, address resistance constructively, and build networks of improvement champions. Ensure learning from improvement is widely celebrated and communicated.
- System Leadership: Represent the Trust in regional and national improvement networks, fostering partnerships that advance shared improvement goals across the healthcare system.
- Operational Leadership: Lead and develop a high-performing Improvement Team ensuring organisational improvement capability building through education, coaching, and facilitation.
Working for our organisation
The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust is one of the largest NHS trusts in the West Midlands providing primary, acute and community services and we are incredibly proud of the diversity of both our staff and the communities we serve. We are building a workforce that can help us to fulfil our values, improve the quality of care for patients, and solve the health care problems of tomorrow. We’re passionate about the value that diversity of thinking and lived experience brings in enabling us to become a learning organisation and leader in delivering compassionate care for our patients.
We are delighted that we have been rated as “Good” by CQC. We have achieved numerous awards; The Nursing Times Best Diversity and Inclusion Practice and Best UK Employer of the Year for Nursing Staff in 2020.
The Trust is a supportive working environment committed to creating flexible working arrangements that suit your needs and as such will consider all requests from applicants who wish to work flexibly.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Please see the attached job description and person specification for full list of duties and responsibilities.
Improvement System Development: Work with operational leadership to establish and evolve the Trust’s Management system, connecting corporate strategy to frontline delivery through robust governance and balanced metrics.
- Lead the continuous evolution of the Trust's methodology (currently Quality Service Improvement and Redesign – QSIR) ensuring it becomes embedded as the organisation's operating model for strategy deployment and continuous improvement.
- Create and maintain the infrastructure that connects strategic priorities to operational delivery through a balanced metrics approach encompassing quality, delivery, staff experience and cost
- Champion the improvement system across the organisation and externally, representing the Trust in system-wide improvement networks at local, regional and national levels
- Promote and facilitate an improvement approach that puts patients, carers and our staff at the heart of service design through co-production, making certain that what matters to them drives how services are delivered
Person specification
Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Management qualification, MBA or equivalent
- Improvement science or OD qualification
- Lean Six Sigma / QSIR / IHI certification
Experience
Essential criteria
- Significant experience at senior level in NHS with responsibility for services, budgets, and performance targets
- Experience leading large-scale cultural change and improvement programmes
- Experience of developing and implementing Improvement systems
- Knowledge of NHS governance and statutory financial requirements
- Understanding of external agencies and partnership working
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Simon Evans
- Job title
- Deputy Chief Executive & Chief Strategy Officer
- Email address
- [email protected]
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