Head of Clinical Operations & CQC Registered Manager

Remuneration: £60,000 - £90,000 per annum, depending on experience

Location: UK-based, remote, with occasional travel to London and other operational locations as required
Employment type: Full-time
Reporting to: Head of Operations, who holds the Nominated Individual function
Work alongside: Medical Director, who holds clinical authority

About Dispensed

At Dispensed, we are passionate about empowering individuals to reach their full potential by supporting better health outcomes. We believe that access to innovative and alternative therapies can transform lives. Through our telehealth platform, we facilitate patient access to affordable, efficient, and reliable alternative medicine services across Australia, NZ and the UK.

About the Role

Dispensed operates a CQC-registered UK telehealth clinic specialising in cannabis-based products for medicinal use. The clinical model works, the patient demand is there and the specialty book is growing. We are looking for a senior clinic operator to take day-to-day charge of how the clinic runs and to hold the CQC Registered Manager function in their own name.

This is a rare combination. You get genuine operating authority over a live clinic, a registered manager appointment in your own name and the established engine of Dispensed Australia behind you as the UK clinic scales, bringing platform, data and operational expertise that most UK clinics of this size simply do not have access to. It is a role for someone who enjoys taking hold of an operation and making it run effectively.

You will lead the patient coordination and clinic administration teams and manage the operational performance of a team of clinicians and prescribers across pain, psychiatry and general follow-up.

You will report to the Head of Operations, UK, who sets commercial objectives, operating priorities and budgets. You will work closely with the Medical Director, who owns clinical standards, supervision and prescribing decisions. Between the three of you sits everything that makes a telehealth clinic work well.

About the Environment

The clinic recently secured its first CQC registration for the regulated activity of treatment of disease, disorder or injury. Clinical governance, patient safety and regulatory standards are not the part of this business we experiment with, and you will never be asked to trade them for speed. That floor is solid, and holding it is the part of this role we will back you on without argument.

What is changing fast is everything around it. We are a scale-up, the UK clinic is growing quickly, and our systems and reporting are being actively developed to keep pace with that growth. We are investing in operational analytics and are well resourced for it, more than most clinics our size, and you will have the backing of the wider Dispensed group to build on it. The interesting part of this job is turning a clinic that already works into one that runs smoothly at three, six, twelve times the volume.

The people who do well here are rigorous about the things that must not move and pragmatic about everything else. Comfortable making a confident decision on good but incomplete information, choosing the workable option now over the perfect one later, and revisiting it as the picture improves. If you want a fully settled environment before you act, this will not suit you. If you want to hold a high standard and build the machinery that makes it repeatable at scale, it will.

What You'll Own

• The safe, compliant and effective day-to-day running of the clinic, as CQC Registered Manager.
• The full patient pathway: onboarding, records and document collection, consultation, MDT review, prescribing and follow-up.
• Appointment yield. Getting more completed consultations from the existing clinician capacity, particularly in the specialist clinics, where an unused slot means a patient waiting longer.
• Records acquisition. Building a fast, reliable process for obtaining summary care records and GP information, which is one of the biggest levers available to you.
• Patient contact and continuity. An owned, worked and reason-coded recovery process, so that patients who stall get helped through rather than drifting.
• Leadership and development of the patient coordination and clinic administration teams.
• Clinician sourcing, credentialing, onboarding, rostering, capacity planning and operational performance, including building an active pipeline of doctors.
• CQC compliance, notifications, audits, risk register, governance evidence and inspection readiness.
• Incidents, complaints, safeguarding and duty of candour, operationally.
• Medicines and controlled-drug governance evidence, working with the Medical Director and our dispensing pharmacies.
• Clinic reporting and the operational KPI set, which is already defined and baselined, and which we expect you to challenge.

The authority you will have:

We have designed this role so that you can act, and so that challenge is welcome.

• You decide how the clinic runs day to day: procedures, rostering, queue management, service standards and team performance.
• You have dedicated analytical and platform support working to your priorities, so the fixes you identify get specified and built, and you sign off the result.
• You can pause anything you believe is unsafe or non-compliant. You then record the reason and bring it to clinical governance within five working days, so your judgement goes on the record and gets a proper hearing.
• You have a written right of direct access to the board on any unresolved patient safety matter.
• You hold the Registered Manager appointment in your own name, with the resourcing and support to discharge it properly.

What You’ll Need

Essential:

• Significant operational experience in a CQC-regulated medical service.
• Substantial telehealth, online or remote healthcare experience.
• Current or previous Registered Manager experience, or clear readiness to register in your own name.
• Private or independent healthcare experience.
• Detailed working knowledge of CQC inspection, notifications, governance evidence and clinical governance.
• Experience recruiting and managing doctors or other autonomous healthcare professionals.
• Experience leading patient-service or clinic-administration teams.
• Direct ownership of incidents, complaints, safeguarding, audits and corrective actions.
• Medicines governance, controlled drugs or another high-risk prescribing environment.
• Experience in a start-up or scale-up: fast-paced, changing, dynamic, and comfortable with a high level of ambiguity.
• Confidence with operational data. You should want to look at the numbers yourself and work out what they mean.
• A practical, rigorous and accountable management style.

Desirable:

• Experience in CBPM or medical cannabis, ADHD, psychiatry, pain, addiction or another controlled-drug clinic.
• Experience coordinating with external dispensing pharmacies.
• Experience taking on a clinic operation and building consistency into it.

Professional clinical registration, for example with the GMC, NMC or GPhC, is advantageous but not required. What matters is the competence, experience and authority to manage the regulated activities well. This is separate from the CQC Registered Manager appointment, which is a requirement of the role and which you will hold in your own name.

How You Work:

• Credible with doctors, and able to hold them to clear operational standards while keeping the relationship strong.
• Equally effective with clinical and non-clinical teams.
• Pragmatic and adaptable. You find a workable route when the ideal one is not available, and you are comfortable revisiting a decision as things change.
• Curious at the detail level. You are willing to open individual patient cases and workflows to understand what is really happening.
• Steady during incidents and operational pressure.
• Straightforward. You raise the difficult thing early, directly and constructively.
• Commercially engaged, with an absolute commitment to patient safety and clinical independence.
• Collaborative. You work with the Head of Operations, UK and the Medical Director as a leadership group rather than running the clinic in isolation.
• An excellent communicator across every audience this role touches: doctors, coordinators, pharmacies, patients and the executive team. You write clearly and briefly, you close loops, and people know where they stand once they have heard from you.
• Flexible and responsive. We are an Australian-led group, and patients do not confine their problems to clinic hours, so the role involves some overlap with Australian time zones and a willingness to pick things up on Slack or email when it genuinely matters. In return, we are pragmatic about how and when you work the rest of the time.
• Motivated by making a service work well for the patients using it.

What Success Looks Like:

• A clinic that is genuinely inspection-ready at any time, with the evidence to hand.
• More completed consultations from the same clinician capacity, with fewer unused specialist slots.
• Faster, more reliable collection of patient records and supporting information.
• A recovery and contact process that is owned, worked and reason-coded, recovering more patients than the clinic loses.
• Reliable clinician capacity, an active recruitment pipeline and improving retention.
• Patients who report a good experience, measured properly.
• High-quality patient records and responsive complaint handling.
• Operational reporting the board trusts.

Conditions of appointment

The Registered Manager appointment is subject to CQC approval, which includes an enhanced DBS check, verification of your full employment history and references, and a fit person assessment by CQC. We will support you through that process. Registration takes time to complete, so we will agree an interim arrangement covering the period between your start date and CQC confirming your registration.

To apply, send a CV and a short covering note. We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all backgrounds. You must have the right to work in the UK.

What We Offer

• Work from anywhere 🌍
• A competitive salary 💰
• A supportive and positive work environment 🌟
• Opportunities to grow and develop your career 📈
• Opportunity to transform lives through alternative medicine💡