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Job summary

Main area
Administration
Grade
NHS AfC: Band 8c
Contract
Fixed term: 13 months (until 11 January 2027 - Secondment only for current NHS employees)
Hours
  • Full time
  • Job share
  • Flexible working
37.5 hours per week
Job ref
990-TD-P&P-18122-E
Employer
NHS England
Employer type
NHS
Site
Wellington Place, Leeds / Wellington House, London
Town
Leeds / London
Salary
£76,965 - £88,682 per annum (excluding London Weighting)
Salary period
Yearly
Closing
20/11/2025 23:59

Employer heading

NHS England logo

Lead Service Designer

NHS AfC: Band 8c

Our Organisation

The NHS is building a culture that is positive, compassionate and inclusive – and we all have our part to play.

As employers we are committed to protecting and promoting the physical and mental health and wellbeing of all our colleagues. This underpins our values as set out in the NHS Constitution and supports us to be an Employer of Choice, while helping our colleagues to deliver high quality services for our patients and communities.

As a flexible employer, we want to support you to work in a way that is best for the NHS, our patients and you. Talk to us about how we might be able to accommodate a flexible working arrangement whether that’s a job share, part time, hybrid working or another flexible pattern. In addition, although the role advertised may have a ‘home’ office base indicated, we remain committed to supporting flexibility around workplace locations. If it works for the service, we will do our best to make it work for you.

We are an accredited Living Wage Employer which means that every colleague working for our organisation and third-party contractors will earn a real Living Wage.  We are one of over 15,000 organisations, who voluntarily chose to pay the real Living Wage.

Job overview

We have an exciting opportunity for an experienced Lead Service Designer to join us on a 12 month fixed term/Secondment for Maternity Cover,  within the Identity and Access Management portfolio.

Our work has a direct impact on millions of patients’ lives, helping them access essential services needed to support them to get appropriate care as quickly as possible. We have a direct impact on health professionals across the NHS providing them with essential tools and services to reduce the burden and enable them to spend more time treating people.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides secure, convenient and reliable access to patient data for over 1 million health and social care workers via the Care Identity Service. 

As well as critical national authentication platforms, IAM is responsible for a number of supporting products and services designed to streamline health and social care workers' access to these authentication platforms and provide a range of solutions in support of identity verification, identity management and authentication.

You will be a key member of a multidisciplinary team, as well as becoming part of an active and supportive design community of practice, collaborating across the organisation, to ensure new and existing services are user-centred, provide outstanding experiences and work for the whole population. You will have the opportunity to analyse and rethink the delivery of health and care services and improve delivery at national scale.

Main duties of the job

  • User-centred service design leadership, collaborating with product management to define a vision for services, and share it in a way others can understand across multiple products in your portfolio.
  • Collaborating with user researchers to ensure the needs of users, and organisational objectives are met
  • Using research evidence, design knowledge, and negotiation with senior stakeholders to improve health outcomes for the public or health professionals
  • Working with multi-disciplinary teams so they understand the role and purpose of service design, user-centred design, and how these help to meet the organisational goals
  • Ensuring our products and services are inclusive, accessible, and equitable
  • Leading, coaching, and line-managing user-centred design professionals in your portfolio area, including service designers, interaction designers, content designers and user researchers

Working for our organisation

Our work supports the NHS to deliver high quality services for patients and best value for taxpayers.

Our staff bring expertise across hundreds of specialisms — including clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial — enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.

We lead the NHS in England by:

  • Enabling local systems and providers to improve the health of their people and patients and reduce health inequalities
  • Making the NHS a great place to work, where our people can make a difference and achieve their potential
  • Working collaboratively to ensure our healthcare workforce has the right knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver accessible, compassionate care
  • Optimising the use of digital technology, research, and innovation
  • Delivering value for money

Earlier this year, the Government announced that NHS England will gradually merge with the Department of Health and Social Care, leading to full integration. The aim is to create a smaller, more strategic centre that reduces duplication and eliminates waste.

If successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the recruitment process.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, alongside the organisational structure and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.

Secondments

Applicants from within the NHS will be offered on a secondment basis only, agreement should be obtained from their employer prior to submitting the application.

Person specification

Qualifications

Essential criteria
  • Educated to master’s level or equivalent years’ experience.
  • Recognised design qualification

Skills and Experience

Essential criteria
  • Significant, senior practitioner level experience in service design
  • Experience of creating and implementing a user-centred design vision and strategy
  • Significant, senior practitioner-level experience of making sense of complexity and working with diverse stakeholders to create alignment through the end-to-end service and understanding about the problem to solve from an end-user perspective
  • Experience of leading, coaching, mentoring and line managing user-centred design practitioners, including interaction designers, service designers, user researchers and content designers

Knowledge

Essential criteria
  • Knowlege and experience of ensuring products and services adhere to, and are design according to, the relevant user-centred design and accessibility standards e.g. GOV.UK or NHS Service Standard

Employer certification / accreditation badges

Apprenticeships logoMindful employer.  Being positive about mental health.Disability confident committedStep into healthAccredited Living Wage Employer

Applicant requirements

This post will require a submission for Disclosure to be made to check for any unspent criminal convictions.

Documents to download

Apply online now

Further details / informal visits contact

Name
Josie Downey
Job title
Lead Service Designer
Email address
[email protected]
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