Health Innovation Wessex (HIW) is delighted to offer a fantastic opportunity to join our team as a Programme Coordinator in Industry and Innovation.
Are you fascinated by change and innovation? Can you help the NHS adopt innovation faster to help deliver better care to patients? Play a key role in delivering impactful events, campaigns, and communications that support innovation across health and care in Wessex.
As a Programme Co-ordinator in Industry and Innovation, you’ll lead and support the planning and delivery of events, courses, and marketing activity—helping to engage partners, promote innovation, and maximise reach and impact. This is an excellent opportunity for someone with strong events and marketing experience who enjoys both planning and hands-on delivery, and is motivated by making a real difference through innovation.
You will be working with progressive start-ups, clinicians and innovators from across the UK and potentially globally with innovative ideas, products and solutions for the NHS and patients. You will play a role in curating opportunities for them to navigate the health innovation ecosystem through various NHS, National Institute for Health and Care Research and national bodies with a focus on events, marketing and campaigns.
At Health Innovation Wessex we improve people’s health, achieve excellence in healthcare and boost innovation and growth in our region’s life sciences and healthcare sector. As one of 15 Health Innovation Networks (HINs) across England, we connect and support academics, NHS, industry, and others to bring fresh energy to old problems, inspired thinking to new ones and to adopt innovative practice at scale.
Health Innovation Wessex (HIW) is a company limited by guarantee, owned by the NHS and University Members with staff hosted by University Hospital Southampton. Based at Southampton Science Park in Chilworth in a bright modern office easily accessible from the M3, M27 and Southampton Parkway train station, the location offers free parking with a café area and networking spaces on site. 27 acres of the Science Park site are designated a protected Conservation Area and open to staff.
We are keen to ensure that staff enjoy a successful work/life balance and offer flexible working dependent on the requirements of the role. Our hybrid working framework provides for a minimum of 2 days in office or out visiting partners/stakeholders and home working aligned to business needs. Health Innovation Wessex endorses personal development and provides training allowances to help you deliver in the role and meet your career and organisational goals.
We are an ambitious organisation, looking for passionate and motivated people to join us with a proven track record of delivery. You will need a tenacity to succeed, great communication and project management, event management and marketing skills, an ability to build new relationships quickly, and the capability to drive innovation in practice.
You may not feel you meet all aspects of the role, but we welcome applications from people with a wide range of past experiences – whether that be of events management, marketing, brand management. An appreciation of the challenges involved with innovation deployment and transformation in health and social care is an advantage to succeed in this role.
You will work a part of a close-knit team supporting start-ups, founders and academics to develop and deploy their health innovations, through events, accelerators and training courses and direct support. You will bring your creative experience to:
- Oversee the end-to-end implementation of all event marketing campaigns—email, social, digital, and website—across multiple simultaneous events.
- Support surveys, feedback forms and online resources
- Provide coordination and administrative support at larger in person events and help ensure smooth organisation on the day
- Ensure campaign timelines, workflows, and approvals are executed to deadline, with consistent communication to all stakeholders.
- Oversee the creation and execution of digital marketing strategies, including search engine optimisation (SEO), email, social media, and content marketing to drive traffic, engagement, and registrations.
- Monitor and evaluate digital campaign performance, generating data-driven reports with actionable insights to optimise results.
- Build and maintain strong relationships with stakeholders, as well as external media, associations, and agencies to secure promotions and drive collaborative efforts.
- Ensure consistent messaging and brand presentation across marketing materials and communications.
We also have a proactive approach to wellbeing in line with our core values of being Innovative, Inclusive and Collaborative, with staff engagement groups shaping the organisation’s culture and driving initiatives to allow our people to flourish despite times of challenge, change and high demand. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and able to thrive.
