Maternity Operational Manager

Job overview

The Maternity Operational Manager plays a pivotal role in delivering high-quality, safe, and responsive maternity services. Working closely with the Senior Leadership Team, the post holder provides strong clinical and operational midwifery leadership to ensure the smooth and effective running of the maternity unit across weekdays, nights, weekends, and Bank Holidays.

Maintaining a highly visible and accessible presence, the post holder acts as a senior point of contact for patients, families, and staff, offering expert guidance, reassurance, and support. They are instrumental in fostering a culture of excellence, ensuring both fundamental and specialist care needs are consistently met.

Accountable for the management and performance of the service, the Maternity Operational Manager oversees staff coordination and deployment, proactively responding to service demands across the maternity setting. This includes leading workforce planning, making real-time decisions on staff redeployment, and ensuring resources are optimally aligned to maintain safe, effective care delivery.

The role also carries responsibility for upholding the quality and standard of both clinical and non-clinical services within their span of control, driving continuous improvement and ensuring care is delivered in line with best practice and organisational priorities.

Main duties of the job

Gaining an in-depth understanding of the process’s supporting flow through maternity and Gynaecology to ensure appropriate placement of patients according to their clinical need and ensure best placement of birth and minimise service closure.

Recognising the trigger factors associated with the Maternity and Trust Escalation policy in order to minimise bed crisis through effective planning and how to implement the strategy when necessary.

Gaining an understanding, and liaising with our Main Trust Operations centre and regularly attending Site Safety meetings to report staffing levels and quality issues.

Recognising the need to escalation admission, discharge, safeguarding and patient flow issues, to the Midwifery Manager of on call or relevant specialist teams and becoming aware of the strategies that can be employed to address critical bed states/maximise staffing.

Implementing the communication with our sister site at Luton & Dunstable, along with other Trusts & Health Care providers in the area regarding capacity to support when the Maternity unit is in escalation and when necessary co-ordinating the transfer of patients to other hospitals.

Support data collection from Red Flag reporting, staff redeployments, emergency calls (working to aid improvement work to optimise safety and provide analytics to facilitate best redeployment for staff.

Participate in roster writing to ensure appropriate skill mix of staff across inpatient areas of maternity

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Please refer to the job description and personal specification for further details of roles and responsibilities