Head of Audit & Regulation

Position: Head of Audit and Regulation
Location: National role, with regular travel
Contract type: Full time, 40 hours per week
Rate: £87,000 per annum + £3,000 car allowance

Are you an experienced regulatory professional driven to make a real impact?

This is an amazing opportunity for an ambitious and determined senior leader, who wants to shape quality and compliance at national scale.

Reporting to the Clinical Director, this role carries significant professional autonomy, influence and responsibility. It is designed for a leader who is confident operating at the highest level, respected for their regulatory judgement and motivated by building assurance systems that anticipate risk, drive improvement and ensure safety.

As Head of Audit and Regulation, you’ll lead the continued evolution of our quality assurance approach from inspection preparation to a continuous, intelligence‑led model.

About the role

As Head of Audit and Regulation at Exemplar Health Care, you’ll lead a team delivering regulatory style inspections, audits and deep‑dive reviews, ensuring assurance activity is proportionate, outcome focused and improvement driven.

You’ll provide authoritative advice on regulatory risk, inspection preparation and enforcement activity, and deliver intelligence that informs executive decision‑making and improves clinical practice.

No two days will ever be the same, but your day‑to‑day responsibilities will include:

• Working collaboratively across clinical, quality and operational teams.
• Ensuring learning from regulatory intelligence shapes training, policy development and service improvement.
• Representing Exemplar Health Care with confidence and authority in external regulatory and quality forums.

Download the job description for a full list of responsibilities.

Exemplar Health Care is one of the country’s leading nursing care providers for adults living with complex needs. We have 60 care homes across England that support adults living with complex mental health needs, dementia, neuro‑disabilities and physical disabilities.

As well as stable and secure employment opportunities, we offer great benefits and perks, and plenty of opportunities to learn, develop and progress.

Head of Audit and Regulation

• Regulatory assurance and compliance leadership
• Provide expert leadership on regulatory compliance across all external frameworks relevant to Exemplar Health Care, including CQC and associated statutory requirements.
• Act as the subject‑matter expert in health and social care regulation, maintaining deep and current knowledge of regulatory expectations, inspection methodology and emerging regulatory risk.
• Lead the development and delivery of a robust, intelligence‑driven regulatory assurance framework that provides continuous insight into compliance, quality and risk at home, regional and national level.
• Ensure Exemplar Health Care is consistently inspection‑ready, with clear evidence of compliance, learning and improvement embedded in everyday practice.
• Provide expert advice and guidance to the Regional Director of Operations and senior leaders on regulatory risk, inspection preparation, enforcement activity and regulatory correspondence.
• Deputise for the Clinical Director as required, representing the organisation with credibility and authority.

• Quality assurance framework and intelligence
• Own and continuously refine our quality assurance framework to be outstanding, ensuring it is aligned to regulatory expectations, clinical governance priorities and strategy.
• Ensure assurance activity is purposeful, proportionate and outcome‑focused, moving beyond checklist compliance to meaningful evaluation of quality, safety and lived experience.
• Develop and oversee a national quality intelligence approach, triangulating audit findings, inspection outcomes, incidents, complaints, safeguarding, workforce indicators and service‑user feedback.
• Identify emerging themes, systemic risk and unwarranted variation, and translate these into clear organisational priorities and targeted improvement actions.
• Provide high‑quality written and verbal regulatory intelligence to the Clinical Director,…