Quality Improvement Lead - 39 hours

Hours: Full-time, 39 hours a week, Permanent

Reporting to: Quality Improvement Manager

Salary: £50-58k + benefits

Type: Hybrid, regular travel will be required.

Location: Handforth, Cheshire

About your role:

This newly created position reports to the QI (Quality Improvement) Manager to support the delivery of the quality improvement strategy. You will work with the QI Manager and the broader veterinary services team to drive innovation, review clinical processes, and establish a culture of continuous learning and improvement across the Vets for Pets practices. While collaborating on these initiatives, you will nurture and support the clinical autonomy of each practice, ensuring that improvements align with their independent clinical decision-making while fostering a shared commitment to excellence.

You will be able to take a systems approach to understand existing processes and utilise complex sources of data to identify opportunities for improvements, you will make it easy for practice teams to engage in QI projects, providing advice, support and coaching to help practice teams deliver effective improvements using evidence-based QI methodologies.

About your responsibilities

• Empower and engage practice teams to use QI methodologies to drive clinical improvements
• Contribute to building capacity for practice teams to use evidence-based QI methods to improve clinical care.
• Develop a community of QI leaders within Vets4Pets, ensuring successful QI projects are widely shared and celebrated across the group. This includes becoming a mentor on the Vets4Pets QI Leaders pathway.
• Implements strategies for measurement and celebration of success within practices.
• Support the QI manager in developing and maintaining resources and training on the QI Hub and within the Clinical Academy.
• Develop a framework for calculating the business benefits of QI projects at the practice level, engaging with key stakeholders including Business Development partners to outline the benefits of QI.
• Be able to break processes down into component parts and work collaboratively with practices and across the group to design solutions.
• Proactively identify and explore opportunities for improvement in processes across vet and retail teams within the business
• Alongside the QI manager, deliver group-level QI projects. Generates healthy engagement of practice teams with QI initiatives, identifying and supporting participating practices. Communicate projects and successes across the group.

About You

• Set the tone and drive enthusiasm for improvement work.
• Adopt a supportive, forward-focused approach to improvement that is truly practice-led, reducing the risk of cultures of blame or resistance to improvement.
• Acts as a role model for our values and behaviours, ensuring they drive our judgments, decisions and actions.
• Able to work collaboratively with different stakeholders, building engagement with improvement work across the group.
• Advocate for the use of up-to-date, evidence-based QI methodologies, including the use of the IHI Model for Improvement.
• Promotes a welfare-centred approach to improve the outcomes for pets and clients through education and pieces of training.

Education:

• Degree-level qualification or equivalent in a relevant subject
• Evidence of training in QI methodologies
• A full UK-practising member of the RCVS (MRCVS) or Registered Veterinary Nurse (RVN) is desirable, but not essential.
• Prior experience in developing and implementing quality improvement frameworks within veterinary practice
• Strong understanding of evidence-based approaches in developing plans, strategies and guidelines.

Experience, knowledge, expertise

Essential:

• A good understanding of the veterinary profession and the challenges faced in veterinary practice.
• Experience applying QI methodologies to veterinary practice.
• Experience with process review and redesign
• Experience in data analysis; comfortable handling, manipulating, and reporting on data.
• Confident in the presentation of recommendations to stakeholders at all levels of the business.
• Flexibility to meet the changing needs of a growing and dynamic organisation.
• Excellent communication skills with a proven ability to engage and influence stakeholders, particularly in the professional arena and at all levels across the business.

Desirable:

• Experience mentoring and coaching others, ideally in QI methodologies
• Knowledgeable about the use of QI within the veterinary industry including relevant organisations, training delivery etc.
• Experience in auditing large volumes of data
• Good awareness of business aspects of veterinary practice

If this sounds like you, we would love to speak further. Please click to apply or register your interest.

About Us:

“We put pets first” is our number one value at Pets at Home. Every colleague has a part to play to ensure that we deliver this value every day. Our love and understanding of pets led us to develop our long-term goal of improving the life of every pet in the UK. This covers not only the pets in our care, the pets of owners that use our products and services but also the pets that we can help through our charity work and through educating and advocating for change in society and the wider pet care and veterinary industry.

We have an ambitious plan, to become “The Best Pet Care Business in the world” and a key part of delivering this will be through customer engagement in our brand and its continued evolution.

We put pets first: it’s not simply a statement, it’s our driving principle and one that you will help bring to life, curating a meaningful brand identity that resonates with and rouses our audience of customers, colleagues, practice owners and investors.

Click here to read our Values & Behaviours

Pets just see people. They aren’t biased and they don’t discriminate. We take our inspiration from pets, and we value and respect difference in all its forms. We aim to reflect the diversity of the communities we operate in, and every colleague can help us achieve this. We encourage our people to be themselves so even if your skills and experience don’t perfectly align, if you think you can make a unique contribution through your values and behaviours, we want to hear from you.