Labour Ward Manager

Job summary

Southend Hospital's Labour Ward has an exciting opportunity for a permanent Labour Ward Manager! As Labour Ward Manager you will take charge of leading the Labour Ward at Southend University Hospital, overseeing the entire maternity service with a focus on excellence in clinical care, leadership, and professionalism.

In this role, you will design and implement effective programmes for antenatal, intrapartum, and postpartum care, while providing highly specialised guidance to the multidisciplinary team. You will be a key source of leadership, offering strong support to the Maternity Matron/Head of Midwifery, and sharing your expert clinical advice with staff and colleagues to ensure the highest standards of care.

Main duties of the job

As the Labour Ward Manager, you will take on the vital role of overseeing the day-to-day operations and leadership of the Central Delivery Suite (CDS), ensuring exceptional care for both staff and patients. You may be required to rotate to other clinical areas, participate in the duty and senior management on-call roster, and work flexible shifts, including days, nights, and weekends, to meet the evolving needs of the service.

With strong leadership and a commitment to ongoing professional development, you will: Cultivate a culture of women-centered care on CDS, supporting individualized care plans, particularly for women with complex needs. Promote safe, evidence-based care that meets the highest standards. Develop and publish auditable standards to showcase service compliance with current best practices.

Provide operational and clinical leadership to all staff working on CDS. Be a visible, approachable leader for the multidisciplinary maternity team, women, their families, and the public, fostering open communication and ensuring effective care assessments. Your leadership will inspire and motivate staff to achieve and maintain high standards of care for all women.

You will actively explore current practices, identify areas for improvement, and lead meaningful change by leveraging research and experience to evaluate outcomes.

About us

With a workforce of approximately 15,000 staff, we can now do more and go further in delivering health services to our local communities. Our ambition is to deliver excellent local and specialist services, to improve the health and wellbeing of our patients, and provide a vibrant place for staff to develop, innovate and build careers. Patients will experience improved care as well as fewer delays and cancellations.

We are able to provide more once-in-a-lifetime specialist care region-wide. With our new trust size will come more opportunities for development, research, networking and innovation. We aim to make the most of our skills and experiences so we can become the best we can be. As one organisation we will recruit the finest and retain more specialist staff due to more employment opportunities across our Trust.

Job responsibilities

Are you looking for an exciting role using your unique qualities, then we want to hear from you. For full details about this varied and rewarding role, please see attached job description. We look forward to your application. Please be aware that we reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive a suitable number of applications.

Person Specification

Registration

Essential

NMC PIN

Experience · Essential

Strong post registration experience Evidence of further development and study towards leadership role

Desirable

Must have worked in delivery suite environment Previous management experience Flexibility

Desirable

Ability to commit to shift work - DM, SMOC and clinical

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab) . From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab) .

UK Registration

Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).