Lead Chaplain

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust; Huddersfield; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust is seeking a Lead Chaplain to provide strategic and operational leadership for the Chaplaincy Service across the Trust. You will lead multi-faith spiritual, religious, and pastoral care, steward governance, and embed compassionate care in patient-centred services.

The role includes workforce development, budgeting, and on-call weekend provision, working with clinical teams and senior managers to promote inclusive spiritual care.

Qualifications

• Experience leading chaplaincy services in a healthcare setting.
• Proven ability to develop and implement spiritual care strategies.
• Strong governance and quality improvement focus.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-faith chaplaincy services across the Trust.
• Provide strategic and operational leadership for the Chaplaincy Service.
• Ensure on-call provision during weekends and holidays.
• Develop workforce of chaplains and volunteers; manage recruitment and appraisal.
• Oversee budgets, charitable funds, and resource planning.

Skills

Spiritual care leadership

Multi-faith chaplaincy

People management

Strategic planning

Education

Clinical pastoral education

Job description

The Lead Chaplain is responsible for leading the delivery of Multi-faith and belief Chaplaincy services across the Trust.

The Lead Chaplain will work closely with the Matron for Patient Experience to plan, manage, and improve chaplaincy services, ensuring that patients, families, and staff receive appropriate religious, spiritual, and pastoral support.

They will have management responsibility for healthcare chaplains, honorary chaplains and chaplaincy volunteers and ensure there is an on-call provision during weekends.

The Lead Chaplain will work within the Council for Professional Chaplains and Pastoral Carers Code of Conduct., The Lead Chaplain will provide strategic, professional and operational leadership for the Trust's Chaplaincy Service, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, inclusive spiritual, religious and pastoral care for patients, families, carers and staff.

The postholder will lead the development of a compassionate, value based service, ensuring compliance with national standards, NHS guidance and Trust policies. They will provide expert advice to senior leaders, contribute to Trust strategy and governance, and work with clinical teams to embed spiritual care within patient-centred care.

The role includes responsibility for clinical and professional governance, service planning, quality improvement, performance monitoring, risk management and major incident preparedness.

The Lead Chaplain will lead and develop the chaplaincy workforce and volunteer programme, supporting recruitment, appraisal, training and professional development while promoting understanding of spiritual care across the Trust.

The postholder will also manage departmental resources, including budgets and charitable funds, ensuring services are effective, sustainable and responsive to the needs of the diverse communities served by the Trust.

CHFT is an integrated acute and community Trust serving diverse communities across Calderdale and Kirklees, with strong partnerships across West Yorkshire. We are proud of our One Culture of Care -- caring for each other with the same compassion, kindness and respect that we show our patients -- and of the values that underpin how we work: we put people first, we go see, we work together to get results, and we do the must dos.

CHFT is recognised as a forward looking, digitally enabled Trust, with a strong track record of using data, innovation and system collaboration to improve quality, safety and outcomes. We are ambitious about the role that acute trusts play in prevention, population health and reducing inequalities, and this post sits at the heart of that agenda.