Chief Operating Officer

As a Board-level Executive Director, you will work alongside our highly experienced Chief Executive, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Nursing Officer as part of the Trusts senior clinical and operational triumvirate. Your influence will reach every part of the Royal Devon: setting expectations, aligning priorities and translating strategy into disciplined delivery at ward, service, site and system level. You will lead a demanding operational portfolio with patient outcomes at its centre and delivering performance against NHS constitutional standards, regulatory requirements and local priorities.

This includes improving access and flow, accelerating elective recovery, strengthening urgent and emergency care, increasing productivity and ensuring resilience through periods of pressure and escalation. Success will mean more patients receiving the right care, in the right place, at the right time and staff being better supported to deliver it. Your defining task will be to build and embed a single, high-performing operating model across the Royal Devon.

In partnership with Care Group triumvirates, you will strengthen accountability, governance and execution while devolving meaningful ownership to clinical and operational leaders. You will use continuous improvement approaches, including GIRFT and our 3

Rs methodology to remove unwarranted variation, redesign pathways and deliver demonstrable gains in quality, productivity and patient experience.

As the Trusts Accountable Officer for Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR), you will lead the Trusts response to major incidents and escalation, providing calm and decisive leadership in complex and high-risk environments. You will also participate fully in the Executive Director on-call rota. This role offers a rare opportunity to shape a unified operating model across a large and complex Trust, influence system-wide transformation, and lead with visibility, integrity and compassion in line with our values.

Why join the Royal Devon at a pivotal point in our journey? You will join at a point when the need and the mandate for change are clear. Major national investment gives us tangible opportunities to modernise care, expand capacity and redesign pathways, including:

• A new Surgical Hub at Heavitree, opening in early 2027
• Expansion of the Devon Nightingale Community Diagnostic Centre
• A new Community Diagnostic Centre at Bideford, opening in summer 2027
• New staff accommodation at North Devon District Hospital as part of the Future Hospital Programme, completing in autumn 2027
• An NIHR-funded Clinical Research Centre at North Devon District Hospital, opening in 2027 to expand research capacity and improve patient outcomes

We also have a track record of turning innovation into frontline change. Our digital foundations and appetite to do things differently give the next COO a powerful platform from which to transform services:
The first Trust nationally to deploy Epic in the community Supporting system partners to roll out Epic, making Devon the first county in the UK to have a single shared electronic patient record Piloting Ambient Voice Technology to improve efficiency and release clinical time Leading nationally in Acute Hospital at Home, with our Virtual Wards service collecting more remote data than any other Epic-enabled hospital in Europe.

We are a research-active organisation, hosting, in partnership with the University of Exeter three NIHR research centres, alongside our own commercial research centre, to improve patient outcomes at the Royal Devon, in the UK and globally.

About you To succeed in this role, you will already have experience as a substantive COO or Deputy COO from a large, multisite acute NHS trust, with experience of…