Head of Strategy | Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust

This is a newly created, 12-month interim role that comes at an exciting and pivotal time for the trust. We have recently launched our new five-year strategy, setting out a clear ambition for the future of mental health care across Kent and Medway.

We are now looking for someone to help us bring that strategy to life - strengthening our strategic capability; ensuring we stay focused on what matters most; and shaping a clear, confident narrative about the difference we are making for our patients, communities and staff, and being open about where we need to go further.

This is a high-impact role, working closely with senior leaders and system partners, it offers a rare opportunity to shape how strategy is understood, delivered and experienced across the organisation, our system and in our communities.

Working with a high degree of autonomy within broad strategic direction, the postholder will interpret national policy, system priorities and organisational insight, and translate these into clear and actionable strategic frameworks for the trust. The postholder will work closely with delivery teams, without directly leading delivery, to ensure alignment, identify risks or drift, and support consistent and meaningful reporting of progress.

• Lead the development, delivery and review of the Trust’s strategy, relevant organisational policies, and strategic plans ensuring alignment, clarity and measurable outcomes
• Interpret national policy, NHS planning guidance and system priorities, translating these into locally relevant strategic approaches
• Analyse and provide highly complex, sensitive and contentious information from a range of sources (including performance, finance, workforce, engagement and system intelligence) to inform strategic decision-making, communicate and build relationships; bring together qualitative and quantitative insight, ensuring patient, community and staff voice meaningfully informs strategy
• Lead and coordinate the strategic oversight of resources associated with key programmes or initiatives, ensuring effective use of workforce, funding and delivery of value for money
• Lead horizon scanning for national policy, system change and population need, ensuring the Trust is well-positioned and forward-looking and remains at the forefront of best practice.
• Oversee and lead cross-functional project teams to develop and deliver robust strategic plans for each of our directorates and priority programmes, ensuring alignment with organisational, system and national NHSE priorities.

We are the Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust. We care for the mental health and wellbeing of people across Kent and Medway. Our teams support adults with a wide range of mental health needs. Because we cover the whole county and both hospital and community settings, we can make care more joined up and easier to access for the 1.8 million people of Kent and Medway. Rated ‘Good’ by the CQC, we care for over 2,000 people in our hospitals and 54,000 in the community each year.

Our vision is simple

We are here to help communities not just live with mental illness, but live well. It’s why we’re passionate about working with communities to make mental health care better for everyone. And everything we do is guided by our values caring, inclusive, curious and confident.

Join us - if you share our passion for better mental health care and want to be part of a team that's doing well together.

We are serious about diversity and inclusion, and we are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, and we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles, like this one.

Lead the production and delivery of our next ambitious five-year strategy with the key aim to produce a strategy that improves clinical and care outcomes for our patients, working with our staff, patients, partners and local communities to ensure their views are at the heart of our strategy

Lead on ensuring that our strategic plans align too the NHS three strategic shifts

Responsible for setting out clearly the trusts role as part of the new operating model for the NHS

Oversee the production of robust strategic plans for each of our directorates aligned to the new 3-year medium term planning guidance recently issued by NHS England (NHSE) and drawing on analysis of finance, workforce, performance, and demand and capacity data.

Please read the attached job description for full details. Please note, the JD for this post is awaiting formal JD/Band evaluation.

This advert closes on Friday 5 Jun 2026

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