Labour Ward Manager | Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust

Job description

About

Southend Hospital's Labour Ward has an exciting opportunity for a permanent  Labour Ward Manager!

As Labour Ward Manager you will take charge of leading the Labour Ward at Southend University Hospital, overseeing the entire maternity service with a focus on excellence in clinical care, leadership, and professionalism. 

In this role, you will design and implement effective programmes for antenatal, intrapartum, and postpartum care, while providing highly specialised guidance to the multidisciplinary team.

You will be a key source of leadership, offering strong support to the Maternity Matron/Head of Midwifery, and sharing your expert clinical advice with staff and colleagues to ensure the highest standards of care.

As the Labour Ward Manager, you will take on the vital role of overseeing the day-to-day operations and leadership of the Central Delivery Suite (CDS), ensuring exceptional care for both staff and patients. You may be required to rotate to other clinical areas, participate in the duty and senior management on-call roster, and work flexible shifts, including days, nights, and weekends, to meet the evolving needs of the service.

With strong leadership and a commitment to ongoing professional development, you will:

• Cultivate a culture of women-centered care on CDS, supporting individualized care plans, particularly for women with complex needs.

• Promote safe, evidence-based care that meets the highest standards.

• Develop and publish auditable standards to showcase service compliance with current best practices.

• Provide operational and clinical leadership to all staff working on CDS.

• Be a visible, approachable leader for the multidisciplinary maternity team, women, their families, and the public, fostering open communication and ensuring effective care assessments.

Your leadership will inspire and motivate staff to achieve and maintain high standards of care for all women. You will actively explore current practices, identify areas for improvement, and lead meaningful change by leveraging research and experience to evaluate outcomes.

With a workforce of approximately 15,000 staff, we can now do more and go further in delivering health services to our local communities.  

Our ambition is to deliver excellent local and specialist services, to improve the health and wellbeing of our patients, and provide a vibrant place for staff to develop, innovate and build careers.

Patients will experience improved care as well as fewer delays and cancellations.  We are able to provide more once-in-a-lifetime specialist care region-wide. With our new trust size will come more opportunities for development, research, networking and innovation.

We aim to make the most of our skills and experiences so we can become the best we can be. As one organisation we will recruit the finest and retain more specialist staff due to more employment opportunities across our Trust.

 

Are you looking for an exciting role using your unique qualities, then we want to hear from you.

For full details about this varied and rewarding role, please see attached job description.

We look forward to your application.

Please be aware that we reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive a suitable number of applications.

This advert closes on Thursday 29 Oct 2026