Legal Services Manager

www.healthjobsuk.com - jobboard; Blackpool; On-site; GBP 53,000 - 61,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading NHS Trust on the Fylde Coast is seeking a Legal Services Manager to lead their legal department through a critical transition to in-house services. The ideal candidate will possess a robust legal background and experience in healthcare law, overseeing various legal functions, ensuring compliance, and facilitating effective stakeholder engagement. This role presents a unique opportunity to shape the legal framework supporting high-quality healthcare services in the local community.

Qualifications

• In-depth knowledge of legal services within the healthcare setting.
• Experience in NHS Resolution systems.
• Training in incident investigation.

Responsibilities

• Oversee the transition to an in-house legal team.
• Conduct advocacy at inquests.
• Provide legal advice on healthcare law matters.

Skills

Analytical skills

Excellent communication

Negotiation

Leadership

Education

Law Degree

Post graduate diploma in legal practice

Educated to master’s level

Tools

Microsoft Office

Excel

Job description

Employer Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Employer type NHS Site Blackpool Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust Town Blackpool Salary £53,755 - £60,504 pa Salary period Yearly Closing 01/07/2025 23:59 Interview date 14/07/2025

Legal Services Manager

NHS AfC: Band 8a

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is situated on the west coast of Lancashire, with services covering the local authority areas of Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre. The Trust is part of the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS) supporting a population of around 1.6 million people.

We have three main hospitals providing acute services to around 330,000 local residents. The organisation also provides specialist tertiary care for cardiac and haematology services, delivers community health services to over 445,000 residents including those in North Lancashire and hosts the National Artificial Eye Service across England. Plus, we provide urgent and emergency care services to an estimated 18 million people who visit the seaside resort each year. We employ over 7000 people from 68 different countries.

We welcome and encourage application from anyone with protected characteristics, as well as supporting reservists and Veterans who are looking for a rewarding and challenging career within the NHS.

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals encourages flexible working in all our roles to support staff in maintaining healthy home-life balance. Working patterns such as: part time working, self-rostering, compressed hours, annualised hours, term time, reverse term time and flexitime working can be explored.

Job overview

The Trust is seeking an experienced qualified solicitor who can manage this busy and developing legal department. The team is undergoing a restructure and the Legal Services Manager will be responsible for overseeing this, and ensuring a smooth transition from an 80% out sourced service to a fully resourced in-house team. This is an exciting opportunity for someone who wants experience in setting up a department, implementing streamline processes and building good relationships.

The department manages all healthcare law related matters and the successful applicant will need to have sound knowledge of an NHS legal setting and be experienced in working cohesively with key internal stakeholders (executives, staff and governance departments) and external stakeholders (NHS Resolution, panel, coroners).

In addition to managing the transition to an in house team, the post holder will be expected to conduct advocacy at straight-forward inquests, independently advise the trust on healthcare law related matters (e.g. consent, court of protection matters), and effectively oversee clinical negligence and non-clinical claims in conjunction with panel and NHSR.

Triangulation of working with complaints and the patient safety/governance teams is essential, and the successful applicant will be expected to drive this forward to ensure cohesive working and early identification of incidents that may also have a legal element.

Main duties of the job

Reporting to the Deputy Director of Quality Governance this post forms part of the Legal Services team to support the delivery of the Trust’s vision to ensure the delivery of safe, effective, and high-quality services, that ensure the people who use our services, their families, carers and visitors receive a positive experience.
The post holder will be responsible for:
• Providing efficient and effective legal services to minimise clinical, financial, operational, and legal risks, including inquests, clinical claims, court of protection and all aspects of clinical legal advice, training, and support.
• Attending court on behalf of the Trust.
• Establishing processes and procedures that meet the Trust’s statutory
obligations and leading the management of healthcare legal services relating to clinical negligence, employer’s liability, personal injury, and coroner related work, contributing to and implementing policies.
• Facilitating a culture that improves quality through leading from legal issues, including Get It Right First Time (GIRFT) guidance on learning from claims, whilst ensuring we act in line with Government Legislation, Regulations, Policy Guidance, and good practice.
• Ensuring the timely and effective collation of information required for claims, litigation and coroners’ inquests ensuring all internal due diligence is completed.

Working for our organisation

Vision - to improve the lives of people who live, work and volunteer on the Fylde Coast and beyond.

Values - The Trust’s values "Caring, Safe and Respectful" help to represent the culture of the Trust and to communicate who the Trust is and how they do things. They also play an important part in encouraging people to come and work and be part of the Trust themselves.

In January 2022 we invited staff, patients, carers, the local community, and key partners to be involved in the development of our 2022-2027 strategy.

Following this engagement, we developed the strategy to clearly indicate our vision - to improve the lives of people who live, work and volunteer on the Fylde Coast and beyond. The approach we took to do this was key and shows that we are committed to listening to our staff and actively engaging patients in how we deliver safe, effective, sustainable care for everyone, every day.

Together, our engagement community told us what’s important to them:

• Being an employer of choice.
• Recruiting and retaining staff, especially from local areas.
• Growing excellence through training, education, research and innovation.
• Health promotion and prevention.
• Improving our impact on the environment.
• Creating safe, healthy environments to work and receive care in.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Reporting to the Deputy Director of Quality Governance this post forms part of the Legal Services team to support the delivery of the Trust’s vision to ensure the delivery of safe, effective, and high-quality services, that ensure the people who use our services, their families, carers and visitors receive a positive experience.
The post holder will be responsible for:
• Providing efficient and effective legal services to minimise clinical, financial, operational, and legal risks, including inquests, clinical claims, court of protection and all aspects of clinical legal advice, training, and support.
• Attending court on behalf of the Trust.
• Establishing processes and procedures that meet the Trust’s statutory
obligations and leading the management of healthcare legal services relating to clinical negligence, employer’s liability, personal injury, and coroner related work, contributing to and implementing policies.
• Facilitating a culture that improves quality through leading from legal issues, including Get It Right First Time (GIRFT) guidance on learning from claims, whilst ensuring we act in line with Government Legislation, Regulations, Policy Guidance, and good practice.
• Ensuring the timely and effective collation of information required for claims, litigation and coroners’ inquests ensuring all internal due diligence is completed.

Person specification

Education and Qualification

• Educated to master’s level or equivalent level of experience within the NHS
• Post graduate diploma in legal practice
• Evidence of continuing professional development
• Law Degree, with a further 2 years traineeship to master’s level
• Incident Investigation training

Experience and Knowledge

• In-depth and significant knowledge of legal services within the healthcare setting
• Knowledge of the NHS National Investigations Framework
• Knowledge and understanding of statutory and regulatory, guidance and best practice frameworks requirements for Legal Services
• Demonstrates up to date, evidenced based knowledge of current clinical and professional issues
• Full understanding of investigations and methodology and evidence of production of quality reports and QA abilities
• Understanding of quality assurance mechanisms and frameworks is desirable
• Experience of working within legal services in a healthcare environment, including working within the NHS Resolution systems and processes that underpin legal services.
• Experience of taking detailed notes of evidence in court (including oral evidence) for wider circulation and briefing.
• Experience of gathering and interpreting data and implementing measurable improvement plans.
• Experience of managing resources across multiple teams and specialties.
• Experience of audit and other benchmarking strategies, using the result of interim change and improvement.
• Experience of working across professional teams and organisational boundaries
• Experience and working knowledge of the Ullyses reporting management system is desirable
• Experience of regulatory preparation /planning and the PIR process

Skills and Ability

• Excellent communication skills including the ability to write reports at Board level.
• Ability to deliver presentations and communicate effectively with colleagues and people who use our services, their families, and carers
• Ability to co-ordinate, lead and participate in local investigation resolution meetings.
• Analytical skills, able to lead and support investigations
• Ability to produce/interpret information that supports quality improvement
• Competent in using Microsoft Office (including Access) & Excel and the internet for the purpose of researching, monitoring activity, effectively communicating and producing reports and training materials.
• A clear understanding and application of the principles of professional accountability and confidentiality
• Ability to recognise and analyse complex situations and or deviation from normal and act upon it.
• A comprehensive understanding of own development and others training needs
• Ability to lead, motivate and influence individuals both within and external to the organisation
• Able to appropriately convey complex ideas and information to audiences, at all levels across an organisation and to stakeholders, through a range of media
• Able to negotiate with senior stakeholders on contentious issues
• Able to chair, co-ordinate and facilitate meetings
• Able to plan and organise across a broad range of complex activities, formulating and adjusting plans as required.
• Understands the delivery of safe patient care raising and escalating concerns as appropriate
• Able to take responsibility for policy implementation and service development.
• Proven track record of ability to co-ordinate the work of the multidisciplinary team and lead on any actions required.
• Proven ability to support nursing management in maintaining an environment conducive to the delivery of excellence in care in safeguarding vulnerable adults
• Ability to provide and receive highly complex, sensitive, and contentious information.

Any invitation to interview will be sent to the email account stated on your application form.

If the role you have applied for requires a Disclosure and Barring Services (DBS) check we will administer this as part of your pre-employment checks. Please note, you will be required to repay the cost on appointment. This will be collected via a salary deduction. You can choose whether to pay this over 1-3 months from your salary or as a one-off payment on commencement in post. The level of check required depends on the role that you have been offered. Currently the charges are - Basic DBS check £25.50, Standard DBS check £25.50 and Enhanced DBS check £53.50.

You are encouraged where possible, to register for the DBS update service. This is an annual registration fee of £16. By registering for the update service you will not have the additional cost of repeated disclosures.

Should you withdraw your application, you may be required to reimburse the cost of the DBS check.

DBS checks remain free of charge for volunteer positions.

By submitting an application for this vacancy you are confirming your agreement to the above in the event you are successfully appointed.

The DBS Code of Practice can be accessedhere .

Please ensure that you read the Person Specification attached below as your application will be judged against this.

Please note that every effort will be made to keep the vacancy live until published closing date, though there may be instances where such interest is generated, that for administrative reasons the post may close earlier.

Please note that in line with national NHS guidelines this Trust operates a strict non-smoking policy. Members of staff are not permitted to smoke on Trust premises or grounds at any time nor take breaks during working hours for the purposes of smoking.

The Trust does not offer interview expenses to shortlisted candidates unless indicated in the advert.

Employer certification / accreditation badges

You must have appropriate UK professional registration.

The postholder will have access to vulnerable people in the course of their normal duties and as such this post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service to check for any previous criminal convictions.