Job overview Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is entering a new phase. Located in one of the UK’s most dynamic regions, we serve a growing and diverse population across Bedfordshire and Luton. As a high‑performing, self‑standing Trust with a strong culture and ambitious plans, we are seeking an exceptional Chief Executive to lead us forward.
You will join a Trust with solid foundations. Since the 2020 merger, we have aligned clinical and management practices across both hospitals and invested in culture, infrastructure, digital development and service improvement. Our THRIVE values guide everything we do, and we expect leaders to model them every day.
We seek a visible, values driven leader with strategic clarity and the ability to unite people behind shared goals. You will champion high‑quality patient care, drive improvement, ensure services are safe and sustainable, and support innovation and staff development.
Working within a complex and evolving system, you will shape local health and care and help improve outcomes for communities. You will collaborate with the Central East integrated care system, the ICB, local authorities, partners and the voluntary sector. Closing date: Monday 23 February 2026
Main duties of the job The Chief Executive will provide visible, values led leadership to Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, acting as a proactive and accessible system leader locally, regionally and nationally. They will direct the Trust, deliver Board agreed strategic objectives and shape wider health and care priorities across Bedfordshire. They will join a high performing but evolving organisation, working across two distinct hospitals with aligned clinical and management practices developed since the 2020 merger. Although integration continues, the Chief Executive will inherit strong foundations supported by extensive cultural alignment work. They will hold overall responsibility for Trust management and performance, ensuring statutory duties are met, delivering clinical and non‑clinical targets, driving improvement and providing safe, high quality services within available resources. The Chief Executive will lead external relationships, building strong partnerships with the Central East ICB, three place sub‑systems, Bedfordshire and Luton councils, neighbouring providers, primary care, the voluntary sector, service users and communities. Success will be judged on organisational outcomes and relationship strength. They will work to improve health and social care provision and help reduce health inequalities across Bedfordshire, supporting long‑term system aims and fostering collaboration. This role is central to delivering sustainable, patient focused care for all residents locally. Working for our organisation Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust provides hospital services to a growing population of around 700,000 people living across Bedfordshire and the surrounding areas across two busy hospital sites in Bedford and Luton. Both hospital sites offer key services such as A&E, Obstetrics-led Maternity and Paediatrics. You will be joining a friendly, high performing Trust committed to ensuring the health and wellbeing of staff. As one of the largest NHS Trusts in our region you will have access to a programme of high quality training and development to help you grow your career. The Trust continues to be committed to delivering the best patient care using the best clinical knowledge and technology.
Our Values
We not only recruit based on qualifications and experience - we recruit individuals who demonstrate the behaviours which underpin our Trusts core values. We achieve this by using values based recruitment. We are dedicated to making our recruitment practices as inclusive as possible for everyone, we are committed to promoting equality and diversity, and creating a culture that values differences. Detailed job description and main responsibilities Providing leadership and setting the trust’s culture
a) To provide inspirational and values-led leadership to the organisation, always behaving in ways that inspire and empower colleagues and external partners alike.
b) To promote a common understanding of the Trust’s vision, its THRIVE1 values and expected behaviours.
c) To continually foster a positive, open and “speak-up” culture that underpins all our activities and our behaviours, and which ensure all our staff are confident of raising concerns without fear of comeback.
d) To work closely and constructively with the Chair to create a high performing unitary Board to govern the Trust.
e) To build on, further develop, inspire and empower a strong Executive Leadership Team, operating both at Board level and just below, and to create a framework within which senior leaders can exercise delegated authority effectively.
f) To foster an inclusive environment, supported by the active promotion and operationalisation of equality and diversity in all that we do, whilst at the same time combatting any form of discrimination that may, advertently or inadvertently, undermine our inclusivity and therefore, our effectiveness.
g) To ensure that our staff are managed effectively and respectfully, and our talent pool is developed, including timely delivery of appraisals, supervision and investment in personal and professional training and development.
h) To work with the Council of Governors, ensuring we hear, and we act upon, the voices and opinions of the diverse populations we serve.
i) Through cooperation and clear communication, to enable and empower the Council of Governors to deliver its statutory duties.
j) To act as our primary representative to patients and service users, to commissioners, regulators, to system delivery partners, to the media and to wider stakeholders, acting always with honesty, integrity and due candour.
k) To identify and promote examples of our clinical and/or support service excellence internally, and to take a particular interest in promoting their replicability elsewhere in the NHS.
l) To provide highly visible leadership across the whole organisation and to be a prominent, supportive and inspirational actor across the local health and care system.
m) Through the application of well-developed collaborative leadership skills, to communicate the Trust’s appetite to work constructively with partners across institutional boundaries and, where value-adding for the populations we serve, to lead or participate actively in collaborative health and care work programmes in and around Bedfordshire.
Creating a vision and formulating strategies and delivery plans
a) To play a leading and highly influential role in creating a vision of what the Trust should look like in 10 years’ time. This vision will seek to capitalise on the capacity and capability of the Trust to enable and accelerate the achievement of national priorities, such as those set out in “Fit for the Future – the 10 Year Health Plan for England”.
b) To communicate this vision clearly and consistently throughout the organisation and to be a persuasive advocate for this vision with external partners and stakeholders.
c) Working with the Board of Directors, to formulate and communicate the Trust’s strategy by which its chosen vision will be realised, ensuring this strategy sets short- and medium-term goals, and is properly informed by, and reflects, national and local policies and priorities, as well as the Trust’s firm commitment to environmental sustainability.
d) In recognising the scope for radical change in the way acute hospitals work in the future, particularly the transformational impact of digitalisation and AI, to inspire, reassure and support the Trust’s clinical and non-clinical staff to embrace change and to shape opportunities for delivering excellent services to our patients in new, better and exciting ways.
e) To set the framework for our annual planning process, and lead the preparation of an annual plan that stretches both the capabilities and capacity of the Trust in innovative and imaginative ways, for Board consideration and approval.
f) To designate primary responsibility for delivering our key goals, as set out in the annual plan, amongst the Trust’s Executive Leadership Team, and to provide ongoing support to individual members of the Executive Leadership Team to achieve their respective goals.
g) To lead the delivery of our annual plan, ensuring it meets national requirements, it achieves our institutional and system goals, it advances our strategy in a timely way and its execution keeps our values front and centre.
h) To ensure we are clear about our own risk appetite and that we manage the Trust’s resources and activities accordingly.
i) To proactively and effectively identify, assess and manage strategic, reputational and operational risks as they become foreseeable.
Championing and delivering quality standards, quality improvement and effective patient care
a) To hold ultimate responsibility for our clinical governance and standards of clinical care, and to ensure that appropriate scrutiny, management and assurance processes are in place.
b) To ensure that clinical quality and patient safety are embedded in our culture, and that they inform and guide all of our activities.
c) To foster and champion clinical leadership, ensuring our clinicians are central to decision-making and are encouraged to identify and lead service transformation.
d) To achieve and maintain a high level of public confidence in the appropriateness, safety and effectiveness of the services we provide, and, where service change is being considered, either by the Trust or by the system in which we operate, to ensure patient safety and equity remain key design principles.
e) To ensure our systems and processes support the delivery of high standards of care, are based on evidence-based practice, and comply with national standards and appropriate guidelines, and to assure, through clinical audit and other forms of self-scrutiny, that those systems and processes operate effectively.
f) To establish and maintain effective and transparent approach to patient safety governance. This will include timely and effective management of, and learning from, incidents, consistency in the application of safety processes, and robust intervention, support and oversight that prevents the occurrence, or recurrence, of avoidable harm.
g) To oversee the development and execution of the Trust-wide approach to continuous quality improvement, so that this becomes embedded throughout all our services.
h) To ensure we subject our services to continual review, and that we draw on the expertise and perspectives of our patients to work alongside our clinicians whenever we design, deliver and evaluate our services.
Establishing a high performing and well-led organisation
a) As the Statutory Accountable Officer, to ensure the Trust meets its statutory requirements and service obligations as set out in our provider license.
b) To establish our operational performance objectives and to designate responsibility for delivering those objectives amongst the Trust’s Executive Leadership Team.
c) To lead regular reviews of our performance against the achievement of agreed objectives, and to determine and take consequential action, as necessary.
d) To deliver against the goals of the Trust as set out in its annual plan, ensuring that key performance standards and measures are identified, monitored and reported appropriately, including those relating to our operational performance, quality and safety, clinical activity, clinical and internal audit, workforce and finance.
e) To frame and deliver improvements in the Trust’s rating when measured against the NHS Oversight Framework, in part by achieving, and indeed, exceeding, performance against constitutional standards.
f) To ensure systems and processes operate effectively to monitor our performance against key performance indicators and to enable rapid remediation where our performance falls short of expectations.
g) To hold ultimate responsibility for the financial performance of the Trust, including delivery of financial efficiency plans. In doing this, to ensure, by working with other members of the Trust’s Executive Leadership Team, appropriate financial systems are in place to ensure that financial duties are properly discharged.
h) To ensure that the Board has before it sufficient and appropriate information to monitor and judge performance, and that it can effectively discharge the assurance duties that sit with it.
i) Working in tandem with the Chair, to ensure the Trust is well-led and well-governed, and that processes are in place to periodically review Board effectiveness, and that recommendations for improvement that may arise from such reviews are actioned in a timely way. Person specification Education & Qualifications Essential criteria Educated to degree level or equivalent
Evidence of relevant continuous professional development Desirable criteria Formal leadership or management qualification e.g. MBA/MSc Experience Essential criteria Demonstrable track record of leadership and the proven ability to lead transformational change in a large and complex health or social care organisation
Significant experience of successfully leading an organisation operating in a highly regulated environment so that it meets its regulatory obligations Demonstrable experience of creating a positive, open and high-performance culture within a large and complex health or social care organisation
Experience of building, developing and leading a high performing senior leadership team
A track record of delivering financial and non-financial objectives in a complex organisation and within a challenging financial and operational context
Experience of collaborating successfully across institutional boundaries in pursuit of shared goals Desirable criteria Experience of Chief Executive (or equivalent) leadership in a health and social care organisation Knowledge Essential criteria A thorough understanding of the national/political context within which the NHS and social care operates and within which the Trust will need to respond to the current challenges or opportunities
Extensive knowledge of the health, care and local government landscape
Knowledge of NHS regulatory frameworks Desirable criteria Knowledge (and experience) of how a large organisation can make a wider, positive impact on the health and economic well-being of the local population Applicant requirements 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.
Read Less
