Overview
Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust – Clinical Lead. The closing date is 16 February 2026. This is an internal only vacancy for staff employed at Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Join Bridgewater Community Healthcare and lead meaningful change at the heart of the Halton Integrated Care and Frailty service. As Clinical Lead, you’ll shape high-quality clinical practice, inspire multidisciplinary teams, and champion innovative approaches that improve outcomes for patients, families and carers. This is your opportunity to influence service excellence, drive professional leadership, and contribute to a culture built on compassion, collaboration and continuous improvement. At Bridgewater, you’ll be valued, supported, and empowered to make a real difference in a Trust known for its community focus, strong values and commitment to outstanding patient-centred care.
Main duties of the job
The Clinical Lead provides expert clinical leadership, delivering high-quality, evidence-based care while acting as a visible role model across the service. The role includes overseeing clinical standards, supporting multidisciplinary teams, leading quality improvement, and ensuring safe, effective patient pathways. The post holder drives clinical governance, supports audit, manages risk, and leads on patient safety, complaints and incident investigations. They foster collaborative relationships, champion person-centred care, and ensure strong communication within teams. The Clinical Lead also contributes to workforce development, supervision, education and training, while working closely with the Operational Manager to maintain service quality, staffing, compliance and continuous improvement.
About us
Flexible working will be considered for all roles.
Unfortunately, we do not hold a sponsor licence for working Visas.
At Bridgewater, our PEOPLE values shape how we deliver our NHS services in your local community. They help us deliver our mission to improve local health and promote wellbeing in the communities we serve. After all, values are about people and they were created in partnership with our staff to reflect what they felt was important to them. Here at Bridgewater our shared values flow through the organisation.
P- Person-centred – We are passionate about individual needs and promote independence in the healthcare we provide.
E- Empowered – We empower our people and encourage new ideas to deliver and create improvements in community care.
O- Open and Honest – We behave in a way that develops relationships based on trust, openness, honesty and respect.
P- Professional – We support our people, so everyone has the right skills and training to deliver outstanding patient care.
L- Locally Lead – We are always learning about our communities and show great pride in being a local provider of health and care.
E- Efficient – We use our resources wisely to provide sustainable and value for money healthcare for our patients.
Job responsibilities
Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust plan to integrate and form a new organisation on the 1st April 2026. As such, if your start date is on or after 1st April 2026, you will be employed by the newly formed organisation. Should you join Bridgewater prior to this date, your employment will automatically transfer into the new organisation. We are confident that this transition will provide new opportunities and a continued commitment to excellence in patient care.
JobPurpose:
The post holder will work as a key member of the directorate leadership team to establish a culture of high-quality professional clinical leadership across the clinical service. This will be in accordance with Trust values, ensuring the delivery of effective, efficient, and high-quality services for all patients and their families/carers.
The key purpose of the role is to provide profession-specific visible clinical leadership within the Halton Integrated Care and Frailty (HICAF) Service, and to develop a clear vision for the contribution of clinical services in line with the trust strategy. As the clinical lead and a core member of the divisional Senior Leadership Team, the contribution will be centred around meeting the service delivery for:
Care quality: improvement and research, patient safety and experience, clinical effectiveness, safe staffing assurance, safeguarding and service transformation.
Clinical practice: working at a senior advanced clinical or highly specialist level, supporting, enabling, and advising on best practice and standards working clinically on a regular basis.
Education: Continuing professional development, workforce development, preceptorship, and student education.
The postholder will be line managed within the operational structure within the triumvirate of the Directorate Leadership team but will be professionally accountable to the Director of Nursing and work in partnership with the professional lead to ensure the delivery of high quality clinical care and promote a culture of collaboration across the wider health and social care economy to optimise patient flow and facilitate the delivery of efficient, effective co-ordinated and timely high-quality care to all patients.
To promote excellence and innovation in clinical practice in all clinical areas therefore improving patient safety, experience, and outcomes.
To contribute to the development of profession-specific essential to role training that ensures clinicians have access to the education and training needs for their role.
Support Directorate leadership team to deliver on Trust strategy Directorate operational plans at place that reflect the Integrated Care System and place partners agencies to provide multiagency services that achieve the best possible outcomes for all patients, families and their carers.
Duties and Responsibilities:
To work clinically (patient facing) on a regular basis to maintain clinical skills and competencies.
Ensure that the highest standards of clinical care are provided and monitored across the Directorate.
Act as a credible role model that will involve a clinical commitment working a variety of shifts inclusive of weekends as the service requires.
To ensure profession-specific advice is provided to all clinical, and support staff which can be highly complex.
Develop, implement, and monitor evidence-based clinical practice in line with clinical specialism to deliver high quality and responsive patient care.
Lead on the development of clinical guidelines, policies, and clinical audit.
Lead on the quality improvement agenda for the service to drive high quality, safe and effective clinical care.
Support staff in identifying, applying, and disseminating research findings related to specialist and fundamental clinical practice.
Develops clinical skills and continues to develop further clinical skills in extended scope practice in response to best practice.
Engages and actively involves the individual and, if appropriate, their family/carer, in the assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation of programmes of treatment and/or care by using person-centred techniques to promote a culture of self-care, involvement and empowerment.
Prioritises their own workload within agreed objectives whilst delegating to other members of the team as appropriate.
Provides and receives highly complex, sensitive, or contentious information where motivational, persuasive, empathetic, negotiating and reassurance skills are required whilst demonstrating an understanding of barriers to communication. This would include when analysing data and presenting data, training of staff and relaying complex clinical information to staff, patients, family members and carers.
Approaches each individual with care, compassion and sensitivity ensuring that these values are reflected in all aspects of the role including the management of compliments, concerns and complaints.
Acts as a source of information and support for other agencies across the broad health and social care context.
To work in partnership with the IPC team to comply and monitor the Infection Prevention and Control requirements for the service.
Provide leadership and be a role model for all staff in prevention and control of infection, implementing and monitoring audits and ensuring high standards are maintained at all times.
To be an authorised signatory for signing off of expenses or ordering supplies.
Planning and implementing these plans for every eventuality within the services which can be complex, to ensure service continuation when required that may impact on the department or other agencies. This includes supporting the implementation of business continuity plans as and when required.
Leadership
Work in partnership with the Operational Manager to ensure compliance with Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulatory framework standards and completion of quality statements within clinical teams. In partnership with professional Lead has a key role in quality support visits to assess teams state of readiness.
In the absence of the operational Manager, the post holder will ensure that there is oversight of any issues impacting on patient safety and escalate to the Director of Nursing, Borough Director. Act as a role model to provide a leadership style which is underpinned by People values and equality, diversity and openness; effectively builds and maintains relationships with direct reports, management team and other key individuals across the organisation.
Demonstrates leadership and innovation in contexts which are unfamiliar, complex, and unpredictable that requires solving problems involving many complex interacting factors, which requires frequent mental effort.
By actively participating or leading multi-disciplinary or multi-agency work streams, the post holder will identify, propose and develop clinical policies and/or service developments which may impact on other disciplines, services or agencies.
Demonstrates resilience when responding to challenge, change and complex or difficult situations.
Demonstrates clinical leadership, initiative and creativity in developing a broad range of projects or plans and inspiring others to be positive in their contribution to continuous quality improvement and innovation.
Clearly articulates the expected clinical standards of the service, monitors and identifies where standards are not met and takes action to support quality improvement of clinical delivery.
Takes responsibility for their own and others health and safety in the working environment.
Ability to represent the service at relevant local or regional clinical forum.
Provides direct line management for a defined team of staff, including performing appraisal, personal development reviews and the application of staff management procedures.
To work in partnership with Directorate leadership team in undertaking skill mix reviews to ensure that the capacity and clinical skill mix is appropriate for demand.
Ensure adequate planning of the staffing model, e-rostering and skill mix meeting service requirements, escalating any staffing issues to Operational Manager.
The post holder will occasionally utilise data and data tools (including databases) to produce appropriate monitoring reports on both patient care and service outcomes and produce appropriate communication for patients.
Please see full Job Description attached.
Person Specification
Relationships
* If you are related to a director or have a relationship with a director or employee of an appointing organisation, please state the relationship.
Qualifications
* Registered Nurse/ AHP
* First level degree or equivalent
* MSc Advanced Clinical Practice (ACP) or working towards
* Specialist Practitioner Qualification (SPQ) (Nursing clinical leads only)
* Evidence of a post registration/qualification in advanced practice e.g. clinical diagnostics / assessment
* V300 Non-medical prescribing qualification (nursing clinical leads)
Job Specific Requirements
* The ability to travel independently across the Trust
* The ability to work flexibly in accordance with service needs
Skills and Knowledge
* Understanding of the principles of complex patient management
* Awareness of complex health management
* Awareness of current national and local agenda in health and social care
* Understanding of how other agencies work (i.e. housing, social services, the independent sector etc)
* Evidence of being able to communicate highly complex information and advice on healthcare to patients/carers and colleagues
* Ability to work under pressure and manage a diverse workload
* Excellent interpersonal skills; including negotiation, influencing and presentation
* Risk assessment and management skills
* Report writing skills;Ability to undertake risk reports e.g., 72 hours reviews and Root Cause Analysis reports.
* Ability to understand and analyse complex data
* Self-management and motivation skills
* Confidence to challenge traditional practice and persistence to address difficult issues
* Networking knowledge and understanding of local services
* Knowledge of the NHS Long-Term Plan and how it impacts on care delivery.
* Able to demonstrate knowledge of the focus on a primary/community care led NHS.
* Awareness of factors which contribute to good health and the importance of promoting these in line with organisational public health policy
* Palliative/end of life care skills
* Has an up-to-date Advanced Clinical Practice portfolio
Experience
* Management/Clinical Leadership experience
* Experience of working with patients with long term conditions and complex health needs in an in-patient environment
* Experience of successful multi agency working across Health and Social care
* Evidence of influencing, motivating, and negotiating with others to achieve change in relation to care
* Experience of initiating and implementing clinical care/protocols
Sponsorship
* Do you have the right to stay and work in the UK without sponsorship (share-codes will be checked if applicable).
Employment Restrictions
* This is an internal only vacancy for staff employed at Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, please confirm that you are currently employed by one of these Trusts.
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
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.
Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
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