Assistant Service Manager

Opportunity

Opportunity to join the Planned Care Surgery Operational team as an Assistant Service Manager in West Middlesex Hospital. This role will be responsible for the Urology, General Surgery, Colorectal, Breast & Sarcoma services. The Assistant Service Manager will work closely with nursing, administrative and clinical teams to deliver excellent performance and achieve agreed productivity targets. You will be responsible for the delivery of high quality and efficient patient services in defined clinical areas and will work on and support the direct management of a range of agreed projects and service improvement initiatives.

You should have experience delivering improvements to systems, processes and performance, working across a wide range of staff to achieve good outcomes for patients. You will have excellent communication skills – both oral and verbal – and will be able to work well under pressure, balancing competing demands and meeting tight deadlines.

The Assistant Service Manager will ensure that line management of their staff is undertaken professionally and that each member of staff has an appraisal and development and training plan consistent with Directorate, Division and Trust objectives.

• Provide hands‑on operational management to designated areas of the Division, ensuring the delivery of services in line with expected service standards.
• Be accountable through the General Manager, Deputy General Manager and Service Manager for the monitoring and delivery of key quality, productivity and performance targets.
• Promote excellent customer service throughout all areas of responsibility, taking remedial action to correct poor and unresponsive service.
• Assist the Service Manager in ensuring that clinic templates, procedure schedules and rotas deliver care at times that meet service capacity and patient needs.
• On behalf of the Service Manager, work closely with the Service Directors and Clinical Directors to assure compliant working patterns for junior doctors, ensuring adequate medical staffing cover is in place to meet the clinical and operational needs of the service. Assist with the booking of additional medical staff as needed and maintain the relevant staffing spreadsheets.
• Support the service manager with the investigation and co‑ordination of complaints that are predominantly administrative/ medical related within the directorate working closely with medical staff and with the Patient Advisors. Ensure corrective action is taken in response to patient feedback.
• Be responsible for effective communication systems within areas of management responsibility including regular team and departmental briefing.
• Facilitate partnership and integration between services across multiple sites e.g. in relation to aligning systems and processes, sharing best practice, improving data etc.
• Ensure effective clinic utilisation and capacity planning, identifying where there are inefficiencies or a lack of capacity and taking steps to address where productivity and access fall below targets.
• Play a key role in ensuring effective systems of capturing high quality data and that all datasets are submitted to a high level of accuracy in line with required timescales.
• Identify service improvement or modernisation initiatives that will enhance the patient experience, improve the quality of care provided or enable improvements in performance; work with relevant staff and stakeholders in order to make recommendations in relation to the size and scope of the project.
• Manage small service changes or assist in wider change programmes as required, ensuring there is thorough planning, scoping, stakeholder engagement, patient communication and resource planning.
• Proactively take steps to ensure compliance with internal and external governance and best practice requirements.
• Identify and manage audits and service improvement projects in collaboration and with support of GMs, DGMs, SMs, Nursing and Medical teams.
• Promote excellent customer service and patient experience throughout all areas of responsibility, taking remedial action to correct poor and unresponsive service.
• With support of the service manager,…