Senior Service Designer and User Centred Design Practitioner

Health Innovation Manchester is seeking a driven, adaptable and collaborative Senior Service Designer & User Centred Design Practitioner to help deliver meaningful healthcare innovation. This is an exciting opportunity to shape innovation programmes, ensuring the needs, experiences and perspectives of users are at the centre of designing and delivering solutions that improve health and care outcomes.

About The Role

You'll play a key role in shaping the future of health and care innovation across Greater Manchester. Working across a diverse portfolio of programmes, you'll lead service design, user research, co-design and service improvement activities to ensure services, pathways and innovations are designed around the needs of the people who use them.

This is a varied and influential role combining hands-on delivery with leadership and function development. You may be facilitating co-design workshops with patients, clinicians or community partners, analysing service pathways, developing service blueprints, supporting innovation implementation, or presenting recommendations to senior stakeholders. Using evidence, insight and creativity, you'll tackle complex challenges and help translate ambition into practical, deliverable solutions.

This role is based at Health Innovation Manchester, an innovation network organisation hosted by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Learn more about our work: https://healthinnovationmanchester.com/

You'll thrive here if you're passionate about understanding people's needs and turning insight into action. You're someone who enjoys working with complexity, bringing together different perspectives and helping teams make sense of challenges in a way that leads to meaningful improvement.

You'll be equally comfortable facilitating a co-design workshop, leading a service redesign project, mentoring colleagues or presenting recommendations to senior stakeholders. You'll have the confidence to work independently, the judgement to navigate ambiguity and the interpersonal skills to bring people together around a shared vision for change.

As a senior member of the User Centred Design team, you'll support and develop colleagues, champion high-quality practice and help strengthen our organisational capability in user research, service design, co-production and engagement. You'll act as a trusted partner to programme teams, providing expert advice and helping ensure that decisions are informed by evidence, insight and lived experience.

Above all, you'll be motivated by creating better outcomes for patients, communities and the health and care workforce, ensuring that accessibility, inclusion and user-centred thinking are embedded in everything we do.

Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) is the largest provider of specialist services, and our Oxford Road Campus in Manchester, the largest health academic campus in Europe - what better place to shape and develop your leadership career.

We deliver care to over 1 million patients & users each year through our 10 hospitals and extensive community services. Our 30,000 plus strong workforce is central to our success and innovation.

You will play a pivotal part in supporting our operational excellence and strategic ambitions. You’ll work collaboratively with clinical and non-clinical teams, driving improvements that enhance patient experience, staff wellbeing, and service efficiency across the Trust.

MFT offers a dynamic, inclusive environment where your leadership, ideas, and expertise are valued. You’ll have access to professional development, digital tools and opportunities to contribute to transformational projects that shape the future of healthcare delivery.

We are committed to supporting your growth and wellbeing, recognising the vital role you play in our organisation’s success.

Join us and help shape the future of our Trust—make a real difference to our teams, our services, and our communities, and fundamentally, our patients.

For further details / informal visits contact: Name: Lauren Constable Job title: Head of User Centred Design Email address: lauren.constable@healthinnovationmanchester.com

If you would like to know more about the role, or schedule an informal conversation, please contact the Recruiting Manager, Lauren Constable lauren.constable@healthinnovationmanchester.com