Birth Centre and Homebirth Team Manager

Job overview

This is a unique and exciting opportunity for an experienced and enthusiastic midwifery leader to shape the future of out-of-hospital birth services. We are looking for an exceptional Midwife to lead our Birth Centre and establish a dedicated Home Birth Team. The successful candidate will be a strong advocate for midwifery-led care, empowering women and birthing people to make informed choices about their place of birth and ensuring access to safe, personalised and high-quality maternity care.

Working closely with the wider maternity leadership team, the post holder will drive service transformation, promote a culture of excellence and innovation, and lead the development of a sustainable Home Birth Service that supports positive outcomes and experiences for women, babies and families. This role offers an exciting opportunity to influence maternity care pathways, improve birth choice and strengthen the profile of community-based birth services across the organisation.

Successful applicants will be required to provide an immunisation and vaccination report, from either their current UK occupational health provider or their UK GP.

Main duties of the job

• Provide operational and professional leadership for the Birth Centre and Home Birth Team, ensuring cover for the delivery of safe, high-quality, woman-centred care 24 hours a day. They will be responsible for the day-to-day management of both services, supporting staff to deliver evidence-based midwifery-led care and promoting positive outcomes and experiences for women, babies and families.
• Be accountable for their own actions in accordance with the Code of Professional Conduct. They will contribute to corporate objectives, and performance targets, acting within local, Trust and statutory guidelines and policies at all times.
• Be responsible for the management of their clinical area/defined workload, effectively leading, motivating, supporting and directing staff to ensure that the patient receives a high standard of care and that time and resources are managed through effective teamwork.
• Work with the Senior Leadership Team to ensure that an appropriate managerial and professional infrastructure is in place to support the delivery of services and functional requirements within their clinical area
• Work with the consultant midwife when women request out of area guidance birth planning.
• Have highly developed communication skills enabling maintenance of high-quality service and ensuring timely management and resolution of unexpected events and situations. Undertake bleep-holder and on call responsibilities for the maternity and home birth service on a regular basis.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Be a knowledgeable leader and resource for staff, advising on national, local and Trust policy and procedures/guidelines, ensuring that clinical governance is embedded in practice. Will support staff and users in service and policy development within a defined area/specialty.
• Be responsible for identifying and assessing complex clinical and non-clinical issues, implementing resolutions and monitoring/auditing outcomes.
• Be responsible for interdepartmental/organisational activities including HR; budget management; complaints.
• Promote and implement new evidence based practice within the clinical environment according to Trust’s policies, guidelines and standards.
• Demonstrate highly technical and/or practical skills to ensure optimum patient management including; complex patient monitoring; equipment management and administration of invasive tests/procedures.
• Be responsible for education and development of staff and service in the birth centre and home environments through appraisal and business planning cycles.
• Utilise and ensure others utilise information and IT systems to secure accurate and timely patient, workforce and resource data available.
• Regularly manage expected and unexpected clinical events requiring high but unpredictable levels of physical effort according to patient dependency/clinical need.
• Support patients, carers and others during difficult situations arising in the clinical area, e.g. imparting bad news or following an unexpected event.
• Promote and monitor adherence to Health and Safety and Trust policy designed to protect healthcare staff and service users from known hazards.
• Ensure an effective learning environment for both students and qualified staff.
• Participate in clinical incident reporting, investigation and clinical audit.
• Promote positive interpersonal relationships and be confident in challenging poor clinical practice or poor attitude.
• Be responsible for interdepartmental/ organisational activities including sickness and absence management, completing appraisals and answering complaints in accordance with expected target times.
• Participate in the on-call rota for homebirth services, as lead for the service.

For further details please see the attached job description.

Applicant requirements

You must have appropriate UK professional registration.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.