Lead Service Designer | NHS England
| Posting date: | 06 November 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | Not specified |
| Additional salary information: | £76,965 - £88,682 per annum (excluding London Weighting) |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 06 December 2025 |
| Location: | Leeds / London, LS1 4AP |
| Company: | NHS England |
| Job type: | Contract |
| Job reference: | 7592991/990-TD-PP-18122-E |
Summary
We have an exciting opportunity for an experienced Lead Service Designer to join us on a 12 month fixed term/Secondment for Maternity Cover, within the Identity and Access Management portfolio.
Our work has a direct impact on millions of patients’ lives, helping them access essential services needed to support them to get appropriate care as quickly as possible. We have a direct impact on health professionals across the NHS providing them with essential tools and services to reduce the burden and enable them to spend more time treating people.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides secure, convenient and reliable access to patient data for over 1 million health and social care workers via the Care Identity Service.
As well as critical national authentication platforms, IAM is responsible for a number of supporting products and services designed to streamline health and social care workers' access to these authentication platforms and provide a range of solutions in support of identity verification, identity management and authentication.
You will be a key member of a multidisciplinary team, as well as becoming part of an active and supportive design community of practice, collaborating across the organisation, to ensure new and existing services are user-centred, provide outstanding experiences and work for the whole population. You will have the opportunity to analyse and rethink the delivery of health and care services and improve delivery at national scale.
• User-centred service design leadership, collaborating with product management to define a vision for services, and share it in a way others can understand across multiple products in your portfolio.
• Collaborating with user researchers to ensure the needs of users, and organisational objectives are met
• Using research evidence, design knowledge, and negotiation with senior stakeholders to improve health outcomes for the public or health professionals
• Working with multi-disciplinary teams so they understand the role and purpose of service design, user-centred design, and how these help to meet the organisational goals
• Ensuring our products and services are inclusive, accessible, and equitable
• Leading, coaching, and line-managing user-centred design professionals in your portfolio area, including service designers, interaction designers, content designers and user researchers
Our work supports the NHS to deliver high quality services for patients and best value for taxpayers.
Our staff bring expertise across hundreds of specialisms — including clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial — enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.
We lead the NHS in England by:
• Enabling local systems and providers to improve the health of their people and patients and reduce health inequalities
• Making the NHS a great place to work, where our people can make a difference and achieve their potential
• Working collaboratively to ensure our healthcare workforce has the right knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver accessible, compassionate care
• Optimising the use of digital technology, research, and innovation
• Delivering value for money
Earlier this year, the Government announced that NHS England will gradually merge with the Department of Health and Social Care, leading to full integration. The aim is to create a smaller, more strategic centre that reduces duplication and eliminates waste.
If successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the recruitment process.
You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, alongside the organisational structure and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.
Secondments
Applicants from within the NHS will be offered on a secondment basis only, agreement should be obtained from their employer prior to submitting the application.
This advert closes on Thursday 20 Nov 2025