Freedom to Speak Up Guardian

Are you passionate about creating a workplace where colleagues feel safe and supported? Join Elysium Healthcare as a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian to lead, promote, and embed a positive speaking up culture across Elysium Healthcare.

This is a unique opportunity to play a key role in ensuring colleagues have access to an independent, impartial, and confidential source of support when raising concerns. Working across the organisation, you will help strengthen our culture of openness, transparency, learning, and continuous improvement, ensuring that concerns are listened to, addressed appropriately, and used to support positive change.

As Freedom to Speak Up Guardian, you will act as an independent point of contact for colleagues who wish to raise concerns relating to patient safety, quality of care, staff wellbeing, and workplace experience. You will provide confidential guidance, support, and signposting, while maintaining clear boundaries around the role by not conducting or managing investigations. You will ensure colleagues receive appropriate advice on the most suitable route for their concern, including supporting redirection to other internal teams where matters fall outside the Freedom to Speak Up process.

You will be responsible for maintaining confidential records, monitoring concerns through to resolution, and ensuring issues are escalated appropriately and proportionately where required. Regular engagement with colleagues across our services will be essential, helping to build trust, visibility, and confidence in speaking up processes while identifying local themes, barriers, and opportunities for improvement.

A key aspect of the role will involve identifying and escalating concerns that present immediate risks to service user safety, staff wellbeing, safeguarding, regulatory compliance, or organisational integrity. You will build strong working relationships across operational, clinical, People, quality, governance, safeguarding, compliance, legal, communications, and regulatory teams to ensure concerns are managed effectively and learning is embedded across services.

You will also lead the development and ongoing support of the Freedom to Speak Up Champion network, ensuring Champions are equipped to promote speaking up locally and provide visible support to colleagues. Alongside this, you will drive communication and engagement initiatives, increase awareness of Freedom to Speak Up processes, contribute to policy development, and ensure Elysium Healthcare continues to align with national best practice and professional standards.

This is a part-time, permanent position, working 30 hours per week.    Where you'll be working: Hybrid role - with a mix of home, office and site working. Given the various locations, a full UK driver license and access to own vehicle is essential for this position.

Key responsibilities:

• Act as an independent, impartial and objective point of contact for colleagues who wish to speak up.
• Provide confidential guidance, support, signposting and assurance following concerns raised.
• Promote a culture where colleagues feel safe, heard and confident to raise concerns.
• Provide guidance and support to individuals whose concerns should be redirected to other teams, such as the People team, where they do not meet the criteria for the FTSU process.
• Ensure concerns raised through the Freedom to Speak Up route are recorded, reviewed, escalated and followed up appropriately.
• Review and analyse speaking up data, themes, trends, outcomes, barriers and evidence of detriment or repeat concerns.
• Build collaborative relationships across operational, clinical, People, safeguarding, governance and regulatory teams.
• Share organisational themes with the Executive team and relevant senior leaders to support learning and continuous improvement.
• Maintain and develop the Freedom to Speak Up Champion network.
• Lead communication and engagement activity to raise awareness of Freedom to Speak Up routes.
• Support the review and improvement of relevant policies, procedures, guidance, training and communication materials.
• Engage with external guidance, best practice and wider Freedom to Speak Up networks.
• Attend sites regularly to build visibility, trust and confidence in the role.

To be successful in this role:

Knowledge & Skills

• Strong understanding of Freedom to Speak Up principles, whistleblowing, confidentiality, safeguarding, and psychological safety.
• Excellent communication, listening, and relationship-building skills, with the ability to support colleagues sensitively and professionally.
• Ability to an