Chief of Nursing Services - Monklands Replacement Project

The Role

This is a unique and highly influential senior nursing leadership role, offering the opportunity to shape the future delivery of nursing services within one of Scotland’s most significant healthcare transformation programmes. The Monklands Replacement Project represents a once-in-a-generation investment in healthcare infrastructure, service redesign, and workforce development, and this role will ensure that nursing leadership and professional expertise are central to every stage of the programme.

As Chief of Nursing Services, you will provide strategic and professional nursing leadership to the project, working closely with the multidisciplinary project team, senior clinical leaders, operational managers, and external partners. You will play a critical role in ensuring that service and system redesign is clinically led, evidence based, person centred, and deliverable within agreed affordability parameters.

You will work with the project team, heads of department, and clinicians to agree and negotiate how services will be delivered within the new hospital environment. This will include maximising space utilisation, considering and implementing new treatment techniques and technologies, and addressing a wide range of clinical issues such as access, circulation, adjacencies to services, and departmental relationships.

Working closely with clinical teams, you will lead the testing of clinical models of care within the live hospital environment to inform future design, support efficient patient flow, add value to work processes, reduce waste, and improve both staff and patient experience. You will use highly developed negotiating, influencing, and challenging skills to ensure that agreed clinical requirements are accurately reflected in transitional models of care and output specifications for the new hospital, while maintaining alignment with affordability and deliverability.

You will drive forward service redesign identified through the Monklands Replacement Project Clinical Redesign work undertaken to date, leading tests of change using recognised improvement methodologies informed by data, patient feedback, and staff experience. This will include close working with workforce, staff governance, and HR colleagues to deliver sustainable service and workforce redesign.

A key element of the role will be leading the development of workforce planning changes required to support the new clinical model, preparing plans for service and professional sign‑off. You will also work with colleagues across the project team and NHS Lanarkshire to ensure digital technology is embedded at the heart of service redesign and future ways of working, with clear benefit realisation and functional narratives informing the organisation’s digital strategy.

You will ensure that all improvement plans have clearly defined aims and robust measurement frameworks to support implementation and evaluation of the new clinical model. Throughout, you will ensure strong operational alignment with the University Hospital Monklands Chief Nurse, the UHM site management team (Triumvirate), and the wider Quality Plan.

You will inform and influence the Monklands Replacement Project team and technical advisors to ensure that the ideas, expertise, and lived experience of staff are reflected within the overall design criteria for the new build and refurbished areas. This will help ensure staff feel engaged, involved, and confident in the future working environment.

The role will require you to scope and apply relevant literature to inform evidence‑based hospital design and workforce modelling. You will evaluate detailed layout drawings in consultation with clinical teams, operational colleagues, and service users, assessing the impact of design decisions on work processes, workforce planning, nursing utilisation, and service delivery to ensure safe, efficient, and high‑quality care.

You will agree workforce models that support future service delivery and are clinically acceptable while remaining within agreed affordability parameters. You will also inform operational staff and external agencies of…