Associate Director of Nursing – Mental Health

Are you a senior mental health nursing leader ready to influence practice on a national scale, shape safer services and drive excellence across complex and secure care environments? Join Elysium Healthcare as Associate Director of Nursing – Mental Health Services and play a pivotal role in strengthening nursing quality, safety and professional practice across our mental health services.

This is a high-profile clinical leadership and advisory role, providing specialist expertise across a range of mental health environments, with a particular focus on forensic and secure services. Working closely with the Chief Nurse, Clinical Director and Operations Director, you will provide expert guidance on nursing practice, helping services deliver safe, effective and recovery-focused care while ensuring adherence to security requirements and professional standards.

As the subject matter expert for mental health nursing, you will lead on key areas including violence reduction, relational security, risk management and long-term segregation, ensuring robust nursing standards are maintained across PICU, Medium Secure, Low Secure and High Secure pathways. Through your expertise and influence, you will support services in strengthening quality, improving patient safety and embedding best practice across the organisation.

You will play a key role in supporting governance, assurance and quality improvement programmes, providing specialist nursing input into service development initiatives and helping teams achieve compliance with national standards, regulatory expectations and organisational policies. Using data, insight and clinical expertise, you will provide accurate and timely advice to senior leaders, enabling informed decision-making and offering assurance around nursing quality, safety and workforce capability.

This is a remote based role, but you will have national coverage across all sites and HQ locations.

• Act as the lead subject matter expert for Mental Health Secure Services nursing practice within the service line.
• Provide specialist clinical input and advisory direction to support the development of service line nursing practice, aligned with organisational goals and Nursing Directorate priorities.
• Promote compassionate, recovery‑focused, person‑centred nursing care.
• Offer specialist clinical guidance to Nursing and Operational Leads to promote consistency in practice standards across all services.

• Provide specialist input into governance processes to support safe, effective and high-quality care delivery.
• Advise and support services in embedding learning from incidents, complaints and audits into practice.
• Support services to maintain regulatory compliance and NMC standards.
• Promote and support the application of evidence-based practice and improvement science across the service line.

• Provide professional leadership influence and specialist guidance to high standards of practice and conduct.
• Provide specialist advice to support nursing workforce planning to ensure safe skill mix and capability.
• Support high quality supervision, appraisal and professional development.
• Promote advanced and specialist nursing roles relevant to the service line.

• Lead as a subject matter expert into the development of clinical pathways, supporting consistent adoption across services within the Mental Health Secure Services service line.
• Ensure nursing interventions are evidence based, measurable and aligned to best practice.
• Oversee clinical documentation, standards and nursing procedural frameworks.

• Provide senior nursing expertise for high‑risk, complex or challenging clinical cases.
• Offer professional input into MDT discussions and clinical risk management.
• Support teams during periods of heightened escalation or acuity.
• Clinically based at least 2 days a week.

• Work collaboratively with operational, medical, AHP, psychology, social work and governance leaders.
• Represent the nursing perspectives within service‑line governance and transformation…