Critical Care Lead Nurse

Description:

The Critical Care Lead Nurse provides expert, hands-on clinical support for complex, high-acuity care packages within a community setting, ensuring delivery aligns with current critical care standards and best practice. This flexible specialist role focuses on strengthening safe service delivery and growth by contributing advanced clinical expertise to package setup, staff training, competency development, stabilisation, and escalation support. Working directly alongside care teams and within client environments, the postholder actively supports practice, ensuring staff are both confident and competent in real-world settings. The role also plays a key part in maintaining clinically credible, up-to-date training, translating critical care standards effectively into home and community care contexts.

Key Responsibilities

Specialist Clinical Support for Higher Acuity Packages

Provide specialist input into the setup, stabilisation, review, and ongoing support of higher acuity packages where required. Support clinical decision making in situations that require advanced judgement and ensure that complex care is delivered safely and consistently.

Advanced Training and Competency Development

Support the development, delivery, and review of training for clinically complex care, ensuring that content is current, evidence based, practical, and appropriate to the service. Deliver hands on training and support to nurses and care staff and ensure that staff working within more complex packages are competent and confident in practice.

Hands On Clinical Involvement

Work directly with teams in client settings where required to support safe setup, practical delivery, troubleshooting, and reinforcement of standards. Provide direct clinical input when packages are new, unstable, higher risk, or where staff need additional support.

Embedding Critical Care Standards in Practice

Translate critical care knowledge into care that can be delivered safely and realistically in a home environment. Ensure that complex care is not only clinically sound in theory but workable and sustainable in practice.

Support to Care Management and Clinical Leadership

Work alongside the Clinical Lead Nurse, Clinical Manager, and Care Managers to support packages where higher acuity or complexity requires additional clinical expertise. Provide specialist input to support package planning, staff preparation, care delivery, and escalation.

Workforce Development

Support the development of nurses and care staff through practical teaching, mentorship, feedback, and capability building. Help strengthen the clinical confidence of the wider service and ensure that more advanced care is not dependent on one individual.

Clinical Credibility and Improvement

Maintain personal clinical competence and ensure that the organisation’s approach to more advanced care reflects current standards and good practice. Identify areas where practice or training requires strengthening and support improvement.

Person Specification

The Critical Care Lead Nurse role would suit someone who is clinically credible, practically minded, calm under pressure, and confident enough to work alongside others and challenge care constructively when required. The successful candidate needs to be able to teach well, build trust quickly, and adapt critical care knowledge to real world environments without becoming overly theoretical. Additionally, the candidate should be comfortable being hands on, travelling to client settings, and supporting teams directly.

Essential:

• Registered Nurse with active NMC registration.
• Post registration qualification in critical care, or equivalent substantial adult ICU or critical care experience.
• Strong adult ICU or critical care background with substantial post qualification experience.
• Demonstrable experience supporting, teaching, or developing others in clinical practice.
• Ability to apply advanced clinical knowledge outside an acute hospital environment.
• Excellent judgement, practical teaching ability, and confidence working independently.