Salary: £79,504 - £91,609 per annum
Hours per Week: 37.5 (full time)
Contract Type: Permanent

Are you a visionary and strategic Registered Midwife with the passion and expertise to lead high-quality, safe, and compassionate maternity services? Do you champion women, families, and staff while driving continuous improvement and innovation?

If so, we invite you to join our team as Head of Midwifery, where you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of maternity care.

In this senior leadership role, you will lead the delivery and transformation of maternity services, ensuring care is safe, personalised, evidence-based, and responsive to the needs of women and families. You will empower and develop the workforce, fostering a culture of compassion, inclusion, and excellence.

You will work collaboratively across the organisation and with system partners, including close partnership with the Isle of Wight through established collaborative arrangements, supporting cross-site working and shared service improvement.

Main duties of the job

• As Head of Midwifery, you will be accountable for the delivery of high quality, safe maternity services, ensuring effective staffing, patient flow, and optimal clinical outcomes while maintaining a visible and supportive leadership presence within clinical areas.
• You will lead on clinical governance, embedding robust risk management processes, continuous quality improvement, and a strong safety and Just Culture that promotes openness, learning, and psychological safety, ensuring services are evidence-based and aligned with national standards. Working closely with the Director of Midwifery and senior teams, you will drive strategic and annual service planning, contribute to transformation and financial sustainability, and ensure performance targets are met through monitoring, improvement planning, and data-driven assurance.
• You will lead workforce planning and development, supporting recruitment, retention, education, and staff wellbeing, while ensuring effective implementation of HR policies and fostering an inclusive and motivated workforce.
• In addition, you will collaborate with system partners to co-produce services with women and families, ensuring their voices shape maternity services.

About us
Here at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust, we are proud to provide expert, compassionate care for our local population. We are ranked as the third in the country for research, embedding education and training across the organisation. Our main hub is the Queen Alexandra Hospital, which is one of the largest hospitals on the south coast employing over 8,700 staff.

Our patients come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds because it makes our hospital stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for getting it right for patients, colleagues, and our community, you will find a home at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust.

The health and wellbeing of our staff is at the forefront of everything we do. We are proud to be able to offer our staff some fantastic benefits including our on-site Nursery, access to our free Beach Hut for those long summer days, our on-site Wellness Centre including a gym and a swimming pool, access to our fantastic staff networks including LGBTQ, Race Equality and Disability, and awards ceremonies to recognise your achievements. We believe we can offer support to all of our staff when they need it the most.

We welcome the unique contributions that you can bring in terms of your education, opinions, culture, ethnicity, race, sex, gender identity and expression, nation of origin, age, languages spoken, veterans status, colour, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and beliefs.

Job responsibilities
Job Summary:

• The post holder is a key member of the senior leadership team within the Clinical Delivery and Family Services Division and works collaboratively with Director of Maternity Services & Midwifery to provide guidance, support and leadership to all midwifery and nursing staff to ensure patient safety, service quality and excellent patient experience is consistently maintained.
• Accountable for ensuring the management and leadership of the midwifery and nursing teams, holding matrons, ward and departmental leaders and clinical practitioners to account to ensure the organisational performance indicators and regulatory standards and quality indicators are monitored, and appropriate action is taken according to results.
• Provides professional, strategic, and operational leadership across the maternity service to ensure optimum standards of care and service are delivered through effective management of human, financial and physical resources.
• Focus is on the provision of responsive, compassionate, visible leadership for wards and departments within maternity and a range of services which are both hospital and community based.
• Acts as a strong patient advocate ensuring that a culture of continuous improvement and learning is supported to drive quality care delivery across the division and facilitate the development of clinical practice to ensure excellent care.
• Provide group model collaboration with the HoM on the IOW during planned absence and any off site working in a reciprocal arrangement.
• To deputise for the Director of Midwifery as required.
• Be part of the senior midwifery team on-call requirement providing senior cover for maternity services.

For full job details please refer to enclosed job description.

Person Specification
Experience
Essential

• Significant post-registration experience
• Broad range of experiences in varied settings and roles
• Experience of leading and managing staff and clinical services
• Experience of successfully leading, changing, and managing services in a complex health organisational environment
• Evidence of effective delivery of complex projects
• Evidence of contribution to midwifery/strategy development and implementation
• Proven experience of quality improvement and clinical governance
• Experience of maternity contracting/commissioning processes
• Experience of leading cost improvement initiatives
• Work without direct supervision to achieve the objectives of the post.
• Working in an environment which demands high levels of energy, stamina and enthusiasm.
• Managing budgets within financial standing orders
• Workforce planning, recruitment, and selection of staff
• Working under pressure, prioritising work, and meeting deadlines
• Utilise a variety of advanced communication skills to communicate to a range of different audiences clearly and succinctly verbally, electronically and in writing.
• Being a highly credible leader who can command respect.

Desirable

• Recent and proven experience of operationally leading and managing complex services.
• Experience of budget Management.
• Experience of service improvement and/or transformational change.
• Experience of developing and implementing alternative models of care.
• Experience of working/linking with academic organisations.
• Experience of working across organisational boundaries.
• Knowledge of modernisation tools and techniques.

Skills and Knowledge
Essential

• A clear understanding of leadership and team dynamics, including what factors make a successful organisation.
• Highly developed leadership skills, including demonstrable transformational style.
• Strong team player
• Excellent communication skills both written and verbal.
• An understanding of all staff groups and agencies/stakeholder across the health community
• Strong relationship development and management skills with senior management, peers, and senior clinical colleagues
• Thorough understanding of current national agenda around maternity services
• A clear understanding of and commitment to the current and changing agenda within the NHS.
• Ability to think strategically and analyse complex problems and interact in a complex multidisciplinary organisation.
• Excellent analytical and numerical skills - computer literate around main maternity applications, Datix, using excel, data interrogation and analysis.
• Ability to develop and manage staff including capability & disciplinary management.
• Conflict resolution skills.
• Experience of project leading.

Qualifications
Essential

• Registered Midwife
• Masters degree or equivalent qualification/ experience
• Management qualification or equivalent experience in leadership qualification or evidence of working toward this.
• Post graduate qualification in a Health-related subject.
• Evidence of Continual Professional development.

Desirable

• Experience and/or teaching qualification.
• Published work in a clinical or health care area.
• Mentoring/Coaching Qualification.

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.

Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).

Employer contact details
For questions about the job, contact:
Hiring Manager
Evie Black
evie.black3@nhs.net