Matron - St Paul's Eye UnitNHS

Job summary

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced registered nurse to join St Paul's Eye Unit as matron covering the Royal and Aintree sites. The matron role provides senior clinical leadership, operational oversight, quality assurance, and professional nursing leadership across the service.

Main duties of the job

The Matron is a senior nursing leader responsible for ensuring the delivery of high-quality, safe, effective, and patient-centred ophthalmology services across St Paul's Eye Unit. The role provides visible professional leadership to nursing, healthcare support workers, and the wider multidisciplinary team, ensuring that services meet national standards, Trust objectives, governance requirements, and patient expectations.

The Matron leads on quality, safety, patient experience, workforce development, operational performance, and continuous improvement across outpatient, diagnostic, treatment, theatre, emergency eye care, and specialist ophthalmology services delivered at the Royal Liverpool and Aintree sites. St Paul's Eye Unit delivers a comprehensive ophthalmology service including cataract, glaucoma, medical retina, ophthalmic emergency care, corneal services, ocular oncology, oculoplastics and specialist diagnostic services.

The successful post holder will be supported by the Assistant Director of Nursing.

Job description

Clinical Leadership

• Provide visible, professional nursing leadership across all ophthalmology clinical areas.
• Promote high standards of compassionate, patient-centred care.
• Lead and support nursing teams to deliver evidence-based practice.
• Act as a role model for professional standards, Trust values, and patient safety culture.

Quality, Safety and Governance

• Lead implementation of clinical governance arrangements across the service.
• Monitor incidents, complaints, risks, patient experience feedback and audit outcomes.
• Ensure learning from incidents, complaints and investigations is embedded into practice.
• Support delivery of quality improvement programmes and service redesign initiatives.
• Provide assurance regarding compliance with regulatory and Trust standards. Evidence from St Paul's governance meetings shows active Matron involvement in incident management, risk review, complaints oversight and quality assurance.

Operational Management

• Work closely with clinical leads, operational managers and divisional teams to ensure effective service delivery.
• Support achievement of performance targets including capacity, patient flow, waiting times and productivity.
• Manage operational challenges across multiple sites.
• Lead escalation processes to maintain safe staffing and patient care standards.

Workforce Leadership

• Lead recruitment, retention and workforce planning.
• Foster an inclusive, supportive and high-performing team culture.
• Oversee professional development, appraisal, revalidation and leadership development.
• Manage performance, attendance and wellbeing issues in line with Trust policies.

Infection Prevention and Patient Safety

• Provide executive oversight of infection prevention initiatives.
• Monitor compliance with hand hygiene, IPC audits, environmental audits and mandatory training.
• Ensure corrective action plans are implemented where standards fall below expectations. IPC performance monitoring is a recurring element of ophthalmology governance reporting.

Patient Experience

• Champion patient involvement and the use of patient feedback to drive service improvement.
• Lead actions arising from complaints, compliments and patient surveys.
• Promote accessibility and equitable care for patients with visual impairment and additional needs. Patient experience and accessibility feature prominently within St Paul's governance discussions.

Strategic and Collaborative Working

• Contribute to divisional and Trust-wide quality and operational objectives.
• Work collaboratively with consultant ophthalmologists, operational managers, allied health professionals and corporate functions.
• Support research, innovation and service development activity within St Paul's Eye Unit, which has a strong reputation for ophthalmic research and education.

Key Competencies

• Strong clinical credibility as a senior registered nurse.
• Proven leadership and people management skills.
• Experience of governance, quality improvement and risk management.
• Ability to influence across multidisciplinary teams.
• Strong communication, coaching and organisational skills.
• Experience managing complex services across multiple sites.
• Commitment to improving patient outcomes and experience.

Typical Accountabilities

• Quality and safety performance.
• Patient experience and complaints management.
• Infection prevention compliance.
• Workforce and staffing metrics.
• Governance and risk assurance.
• Delivery of divisional objectives.
• Clinical standards across Royal Liverpool and Aintree ophthalmology services.

Success Measures

• Safe staffing and workforce stability.
• Positive patient experience outcomes.
• Reduction in incidents and avoidable harm.
• Strong governance assurance.
• Improved service performance and productivity.
• Successful implementation of improvement initiatives.
• High levels of staff engagement and professional development.

About us

Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust comprises Aintree University Hospital, Broadgreen Hospital & Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

We are part of NHS University Hospitals of Liverpool Group, formed on 1 Nov 2024 from the coming together of LUHFT and Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust. The Group was born from a shared aim to improve the care we provide our patients.

UHLG is one of the largest employers in the region, with over 16,800 colleagues dedicated to caring for our communities - from birth and beyond.

For the 630,000 people across Merseyside, we are their local NHS. We provide general and emergency hospital care, alongside highly specialised regional services for more than two million people in the North West.

Aintree University Hospital is the single receiving site for adult major trauma patients in Cheshire and Merseyside and hosts a number of regional services including an award-winning stroke facility. Broadgreen Hospital is home to elective surgical, diagnostic and treatment services, together with specialist patient rehabilitation. Liverpool Women's Hospital specialises in the health of women and babies, delivering over 7,200 babies in the UK's largest single site maternity hospital each year. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital is the largest hospital in the country to provide inpatients with 100% single bedrooms and focuses on complex planned care and specialist services.

For roles at Liverpool Women's, visit their careers page.