Head of Complaints, Band 8a

Head of Complaints, Band 8a

The closing date is 27 April 2026

Lead the Complaints team across Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, ensuring compliance with external requirements and best practice. Oversee investigations, manage timelines, and collaborate with patient safety, governance, senior managers and staff to address high level complaints from bodies such as the Public Health Service Ombudsman, Parliament and the Care Quality Commission. Develop strategies for collecting and acting on patient feedback, and coordinate the accurate capture, analysis and reporting of complaints and PALS data across the Trust.

Main Duties

• The Trust's expert on NHS complaints handling, providing specialist advice to senior managers and Board members.
• Critical role providing leadership to the Complaints Team, including a wide range of monitoring and reporting responsibilities to Governance, Delivery and Assurance Groups, ensuring delivery of a consistently excellent complaints service to the Trust's patients, their families and carers and members of the public.
• Co develop and lead complaints related service improvement initiatives with Associate Directors (Safety, Experience and Effectiveness).
• Vital role in identifying and cascading organisational learning from complaints.
• Key point of operational interface between Divisions and the corporate complaints function.

About Us

Joining our Complaints Team means being part of a supportive, values driven service that plays a vital role in listening to patients and families, responding with compassion, and turning concerns into meaningful learning and improvement. You will work alongside experienced colleagues who care deeply about fairness, kindness and doing the right thing-supporting people at difficult moments while helping the Trust improve the quality and safety of care. This is a role where your empathy, judgement and professionalism will genuinely make a difference.

Responsibilities

• Deal with delicate and confidential matters using sensitivity and judgement honed by significant experience of working in NHS complaints and customer care.
• Provide complaints expertise to staff at all levels of the organisation, including in complaints management, identification of themes and trends, policies and processes and statistical analysis.
• Use patient complaints, enquiries and feedback to monitor the quality of hospital services, identify any problem areas and support the divisions with improvement interventions.
• Produce timely and reliable complaints data for a range of Corporate and Divisional dashboards and meetings.
• Ensure responses for complaints where there is a Coroner's Inquest align with the process and with the requirements of the Coroner and the Coroner's Officer are appropriate and manage relevant members of staff in respect of managing such complaints.
• Ensure alignment with incident or complaints investigations.
• Responsible for the accurate maintenance of all data entered into the complaints database (DATIX); including manipulation in order to provide regular feedback and reports which facilitate the identification of trends, action required and shared learning points and other reports on request. Monitor the database to ensure that it provides the information required for reporting complaints received by the Trust.
• Act as chair for contentious meetings making independent, on the spot, decisions to negotiate and resolve concerns and issues that are sensitive and serious in nature, in situations and when staff and patients will not be in agreement.
• Provide detailed information as stipulated within tight timescales in response to requests made by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.
• Provide high quality data for a range of regulatory and governance purposes (e.g., annual quality reports, CQC inspections, Clinical Commissioning Group contracts).
• Write the Trust's Quarterly and Annual Complaints reports for the senior governance committees, including Trust Board.
• Liaise with senior managers to identify and address service level performance issues identified through patient feedback and complaints.
• Promote the importance of welcoming complaints and feedback from patients and the public in monitoring and improving hospital services.
• Take the lead for collecting and collating evidence to demonstrate compliance with the Care Quality Commission's standards on complaints management.
• Investigate and respond to Complaints relating to Complaint Handling.
• Ensure appropriate mechanisms are in place to receive and act upon regular feedback from people about their experiences of using the Trust's complaints service both staff and complainants.

Person Specification Professional Development, Education and Training

• Educated to master's degree level or demonstrable related relevant experience.
• On-going learning and professional development in relevant fields, e.g., complaints resolution, customer service, patient and public involvement, mediation.
• Evidence of on-going training and development in a management or supervisory role.
• Training in mediation and facilitation skills.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Experience in, and specialist knowledge of, the field of NHS complaints.
• Understanding of legislation and regulatory frameworks, national and local policies relating to NHS complaints management and patient support.
• Experience of working with staff in a health, social care or other complex service oriented environment.
• Experience of writing and providing written reports, which includes thematic analysis to support operational and corporate need.
• Advanced knowledge of all Microsoft Office applications.
• Experience of managing a team and acting as a positive role model for team members.
• Excellent communication skills and presentation skills, both written and oral and the ability to liaise with staff at all levels.
• Teaching skills and the ability to develop and deliver training sessions and programmes related to complaints.
• Ability to extract performance insights from complex data sets.

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.

Employer Name

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Salary

£57,528 to £64,750 a year (pa, pro rata if part time)