Non-Executive Director

Welcome from Professor Sir Keith Willett, Chair

Thank you for expressing an interest in joining our Trust as a Non-Executive Director. I hope that you find our recruitment website useful and informative.

South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SCAS) provides a range of emergency, urgent care and non-emergency healthcare services. We deliver services to the populations of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, West Berkshire and Hampshire. We employ 4,700 staff who, together with over 900 volunteers, enable us to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The NHS finds itself in very challenging circumstances and SCAS is no exception. Our services in 999, NHS 111, Patient Transport Services (PTS) and Clinical Coordination Centres (CCCs) continue to operate under significant pressure.

Our focus continues to be on ensuring we deliver a high-quality safe service, have a timely response to incidents, look after our workforce and live within the financial resource we have allocated to us. To do this it is imperative that we work closely with the wider NHS, emergency services, and public and voluntary sector partners to deliver our strategy and align it with the systems we work with. Our response to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection of our 999 call centres and frontline operations, and the resultant report published in August 2022, continues to focus on four key areas: governance and well-led, culture and staff wellbeing, performance improvement, and patient safety.

I am working closely with David Eltringham, our Chief Executive and our NHS England Improvement Director to shape and develop a strong Unitary Board to deliver, keeping our operations safe and our staff supported.

We are looking to appoint two NEDs who will bring significant Board level leadership experience (Executive or NED) from similar complex, highly regulated public facing organisations. Within that we would like to hear from individuals with board level skills in organisational development, transformation and culture change, communications and engagement as well as those with strategic clinical experience particularly around primary care, community services or the emergency care pathway. Knowledge of the charitable sector would be beneficial.

You will need to be a strategic thinker who understands the challenges of operating as part of a Unitary Board with the experience to provide supportive challenge in a pressurised environment under external scrutiny. Politically astute, you will enjoy engaging and working collaboratively with internal and external stakeholders to ensure that SCAS delivers its priorities and works effectively with its system partners. You will have the highest standards of personal integrity and will also be able to demonstrate a clear understanding of, and alignment to, our values.

We want our Board to provide a broad spectrum of lived experience and are keen to attract candidates who can bring diverse perspectives. We welcome expressions of interest from the widest possible range of backgrounds, particularly those who are under-represented at Board level in the NHS.

For a confidential discussion please contact Melanie Shearer or Julia St Clare our recruitment partners from GatenbySanderson.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Professor Sir Keith Willett, Chair