Job overview

Are you an ambitious and effective  senior leader who can inspire and motivate teams to deliver results? 

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust operate as a Group, working together to strengthen services, improve outcomes, and deliver consistent, high‑quality care for our communities.

We are seeking a Group Associate Director of Improvement to make a genuine difference and drive meaningful change. 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 and senior leadership colleagues, Organisational Development, Workforce, 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.