This is a highly visible operational leadership role. You'll lead the team that keeps the front door of the practice open every day, ensuring patients can access the right care at the right time, whilst supporting staff through the challenges of working on the front line of general practice.
Job Summary/Overview:
The Care Navigation Manager leads one of the busiest and most visible services within Combe Down Surgery, ensuring patients receive a safe, compassionate and efficient service from first contact through to accessing the right clinician or service.
This is a fast-paced operational management role, leading a large front-line team responsible for managing over 6,000 incoming telephone calls each month, alongside thousands of online requests and face-to-face patient contacts. Since introducing online triage, the team has processed over 98,000 patient requests, making Care Navigation central to how patients access care.
As the operational lead, you will be responsible for ensuring the service runs safely and efficiently throughout the day, balancing patient demand, staffing, clinical capacity and unexpected operational pressures, as well as clinic and staff rota’s. You will regularly make decisions in a rapidly changing environment, often dealing with urgent issues requiring immediate action.
The role combines compassionate people management with strong operational leadership.
You will support staff through challenging patient interactions, oversee service improvement, develop your team and work closely with clinicians and the wider management team to continually improve patient access and experience.
Job Responsibilities:
The list of duties below is not exhaustive and may be subject to change as deemed necessary.
The Nature of the Role
Care Navigation is one of the busiest operational departments within the practice and is often the first point of contact for patients.
The successful candidate will be expected to:
- Lead a busy front-line team supporting thousands of patients every month.
- Make timely operational decisions throughout the day to maintain safe patient access.
- Respond calmly to unexpected staffing shortages, clinical sickness, urgent diary changes and service disruption.
- Support staff dealing with distressed, vulnerable or occasionally abusive patients.
- Balance patient expectations with finite clinical capacity whilst maintaining excellent customer service.
- Work flexibly to meet the needs of the service, including regular late shifts and occasional Saturday working if cover is needed.
Care Navigation Management:
· Attend weekly SLT meetings on Tuesday mornings at CD.
· Provide operational leadership for the Care Navigation service, ensuring the safe, efficient and resilient delivery of patient access across both surgery sites. Manage the front of house operations of the practice to ensure smooth, efficient operation of the practice including Care Navigation, oversight of room availability, general administration, patient care and services.
· Ensure the waiting rooms/public areas are clean and well-presented, and that notice boards are up to date, music is playing, and queues are dealt with.
· Responsible for general office management of the ‘back office’ at both surgeries, ensuring that Care Navigation office areas are tidy, well organised and well stocked.
· Respond to real-time operational pressures including emergency staffing shortages, unexpected sickness, clinician absence and urgent changes to appointment capacity.
· Provide visible leadership and support to staff managing distressed, vulnerable or occasionally abusive patients, ensuring staff wellbeing whilst maintaining high standards of patient care. Manage the development and transformation of the Care Navigation role to enable them to deliver a high standard of customer service.
Care Navigation Team, Access and Support
· Take operational responsibility for patient access throughout the day, continually reviewing capacity and demand, escalating risks and implementing solutions to maintain safe services.
· Act as the senior operational decision-maker for the Care Navigation service during the working day, using initiative and sound judgement to resolve issues quickly and safely.
· Support the practice to meet all access to appointment standards together with developing and implementing systems and processes to achieve higher than the standard access requirements and provide exemplar access for patients.
· Supporting the Care Navigation team to facilitate access to patient services by ensuring prompt telephone answering, and signposting to most appropriate service or clinician.
· Monitor daily, weekly and forward appointment availability, flagging up any concerns or shortfalls as appropriate. Supported by the management team and Partners.
· If/when online triage system is implemented, be part of the onboarding and implementation team. Assist in designing and understanding the system, and subsequent training of Care Navigation and other team members as appropriate to understand the system and utilise it to its best effect to optimise use of available clinician resources. With support from management team and Partners.
· Assist with and offer advice on templates and Read Codes, ensuring Care Navigation staff are kept up to date.
· Manage all administrative functions within SystmOne, AccuRX and other IT systems at the practice relevant to Care Navigation, ensuring all tasks are dealt with in a timely manner.
· Respond to patient enquires, compliments, comments, or complaints, in a timely and considerate manner ensuring adherence to the Complaints Policy including timescales for responding and taking actions to reduce future complaints. With support from the deputy practice manager and manager if appropriate.
· Support the Deputy Practice Manager to ensure incident reporting, and complaints, are recorded appropriately according to policies and procedures and work together to ensure resolution.
· Ensure the patient registration procedure is up to date and understood by relevant staff and that it is carried out effectively and efficiently.
· Understand and manage the telephone system, daytime and out of hours, and be able to respond to problems in the absence of the Deputy Practice Manager/Practice Manager.
· Work collaboratively and support patient participation group activity, including attending relevant meetings.
· Alongside the Practice Manager, liaise with and support the ‘Friends of Combe Down Surgery’.
· Manage the prescription process team. Facilitate the close working of this team, and wider Care Navigation team with the pharmacy team to maintain and improve the current provision of prescription services. Support staff to manage patient expectations with respect to getting prescriptions completed.
Staff Supervision & Support:
· Act as a role model and manage the Care Navigation team, supporting, motivating and promoting good staff relations.
· Engage and motivate team members so that they understand and work to achieve objectives and feel that their role makes a positive contribution to the outstanding performance of the practice.
· Line management of Care Navigation team including induction, sickness absence management, return to work interviews, staff appraisals, performance management, training and development of all Care Navigation staff. With deputy practice manager, manage allocation of duties in the Care Navigation team.
· Manage Care Navigation staff rotas and holidays, always ensuring efficient deployment of staff.
· Be prepared to train staff in various office applications, e.g. SystmOne, Outlook, and Clarity Teamnet.
· Lead the daily Huddle and hold regular team meetings to ensure information is shared with the whole team and any issues are dealt with.
· Take an active role in planning, delivering and evaluating staff training afternoons.
· Work collaboratively with the Deputy Practice Manager and Practice Manager in the recruitment and induction process of new staff.
· Liaise with the Deputy Practice Manager advising of flexible working requests, changes to hours on a monthly basis, and any termination arrangements.
Pay: £30,225.00-£32,175.00 per year
Work Location: In person
