About the role
The Patient Safety team sits within the Corporate Directorate of Nursing and Quality. The team is required to set the strategic direction for patient safety, to deliver on reactive and proactive aspects of patient safety improvement work, and to deliver education and training to enable and support front line staff to keep patients and staff safer.
The job purpose for the Patient Safety Investigator is to lead Patient Safety Incident Response investigations and reviews within the Trust. The key objective of the investigation is to identify underlying system factors that contributed to an incident or patient safety event. These findings are then used to identify effective, sustainable improvements by combining learning across multiple patient safety incident investigations and other responses into a similar incident type.
The Investigator will work in line with Being Open and Duty of Candour principles, ensuring appropriate investigation/review methodology and a systems-based approach to support the Trust’s patient safety improvement work.
This includes developing a culture of continuous learning and improvement and one where staff feel psychologically safe to raise patient safety concerns; by ensuring responses to incidents are compassionate, effective, fair and consistent. The postholder will also support the process of learning from investigation and review outcomes to ensure these inform trust wide improvement programmes, plans and development activities.
Responsibilities
* Lead and manage multiple transient investigations and reviews and provide high quality, comprehensive, concise, and unbiased reports within the allocated timescales as per NHS Frameworks and regulations using a system-based approach.
* Act with integrity and be professionally responsible and accountable for own caseload and develop investigation plans and use peer review, subject matter experts and multidisciplinary teams to support quality and consistency.
* Engage and collaborate with internal staff involved and with external staff from other agencies, using a wide range of investigative methodologies and approaches.
* Communicate highly complex, sensitive and distressing information effectively to a range of stakeholders including patients, families, carers and staff whilst ensuring compassion, empathy and support are demonstrated throughout.
* Support organisational resilience to react promptly to adverse events (safety-I approach) and promote learning continuously and meaningfully from everyday work (safety-II approach).
* Use relevant resources to analyse complex findings e.g. policy, protocol, training records, data reports, etc.
* Ensure the findings and recommendations of the report are discussed and agreed with responsible senior leadership teams prior to submitting the report for approval.
* Support external investigations as appropriate.
Requirements
The post holder must hold a full, valid, UK driving licence and have access to a car/vehicle to use for business purposes (unless you have a disability as defined by the Equality Act 2010).
About Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust
We are the Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust. We care for the mental health and wellbeing of people across Kent and Medway. Our teams support adults with a wide range of mental health needs. Because we cover the whole county and both hospital and community settings, we can make care more joined up and easier to access for the 1.8 million people of Kent and Medway. Rated ‘Good’ by the CQC, we care for over 2,000 people in our hospitals and 54,000 in the community each year.
Our Vision and Values
Our vision is simple: We are here to help communities not just live with mental illness, but live well. It’s why we’re passionate about working with communities to make mental health care better for everyone. And everything we do is guided by our values caring, inclusive, curious and confident.
Diversity and Inclusion
We are serious about diversity and inclusion, and we are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, and we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles.
This advert closes on Thursday 7 May 2026.
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