At Our Future Health, we're building the UK's largest ever health research programme, bringing together up to five million volunteers to transform how we prevent, detect and treat disease.
This is an opportunity to lead one of the most important operational functions in the organisation. As Director of Participant Operations, you will be responsible for ensuring every participant has an outstanding experience while leading the strategies, services and partnerships that enable us to recruit, engage and retain a diverse population at unprecedented scale.
Reporting directly to the Chief Health Officer, you'll play a pivotal role, combining strategic leadership with operational excellence, ensuring participant needs remain at the heart of everything we do while translating organisational priorities into high-performing, measurable delivery.
Working across clinical, product, technology, communications, data and delivery teams, you'll help shape the future of participant engagement in health research and influence how millions of people contribute to improving healthcare for generations to come.
The impact you'll make
This is a broad leadership role with responsibility for the end-to-end participant journey.
You'll lead the teams responsible for participant recruitment, engagement, community partnerships and participant support, ensuring we continue to attract a representative population while delivering an exceptional experience from first interaction through long-term participation.
You'll champion participant voice across the organisation, ensuring that insight, lived experience and feedback directly influence strategic decisions, service design and operational priorities.
You'll also ensure our operational capability continues to evolve alongside the organisation, building services, partnerships and ways of working that can support increasingly sophisticated participant journeys as Our Future Health continues to grow.
What you'll be doing
Participant Attraction and Representation
- You'll own the operational strategy and performance for participant recruitment across the organisation, ensuring we achieve ambitious targets for recruitment, representation and cost efficiency.
- Working with internal teams and external partners, you'll oversee forecasting, recruitment planning, supplier performance and delivery pipelines, identifying opportunities to improve conversion, increase participation and strengthen representation across diverse communities.
- You'll build trusted relationships with community organisations and strategic partners to help ensure Our Future Health reaches people from every part of the UK.
Participant Experience and Services
- You'll develop and lead our Participant Experience Strategy, ensuring every interaction participants have with Our Future Health is consistent, accessible, inclusive and reflects our organisational values.
- You'll oversee participant support services, complaints management and service operations, ensuring high-quality customer service, strong performance against service standards and continual improvement based on participant feedback and operational insight.
- You'll establish governance, escalation routes and service frameworks that enable teams to resolve complex issues quickly while maintaining trust and confidence.
Participant Insight and Strategy
- You'll ensure their perspectives influence strategic and operational decisions by embedding participant insight across product development, clinical delivery and organisational planning.
- Working closely with senior leaders across the organisation, you'll use research, data and participant feedback to shape future services, improve engagement and support long-term retention across the programme.
Leadership & Governance
- You'll lead multidisciplinary teams spanning participant recruitment, engagement, partnerships and participant services, creating a culture focused on collaboration, accountability and continuous improvement.
- You'll establish clear priorities, performance measures and delivery plans while managing significant budgets and ensuring excellent value for money across internal operations and supplier relationships.
- As a member of the senior leadership team, you'll contribute to organisational strategy, provide advice to the Chief Health Officer and help shape the future direction of Our Future Health.
Requirements
We're looking for an experienced operational leader who has successfully delivered complex, customer or participant-facing services at scale.
You'll bring:
- Significant senior leadership experience within participant, patient, customer, public engagement or service delivery environments.
- A proven track record of leading large operational teams, managing budgets, supplier relationships and delivering measurable organisational outcomes.
- Experience leading large-scale recruitment, engagement or customer experience programmes with responsibility for improving participation, retention and service quality.
- Experience improving diversity, inclusion and representation across large populations or public-facing programmes.
- Strong operational planning and performance management capability, with the ability to translate strategy into effective delivery.
- Outstanding stakeholder management and influencing skills, with experience working across multidisciplinary organisations.
- The confidence to lead through complexity, ambiguity and organisational change while providing clear direction and calm leadership.
- A strong commitment to participant-centred design, equity, diversity and inclusion.
- Experience within health research, healthcare, public health, life sciences or other regulated environments would be highly valued.
Closing date for applications : 9am, Friday 31st July.
Benefits
- Salary from £100,000.
- Generous Pension Scheme – We invest in your future with employer contributions of up to 12%.
- 30 Days Holiday + Bank Holidays – Enjoy a generous holiday allowance with the flexibility to take bank holidays when it suits you.
- Enhanced Parental Leave – Supporting you during life’s biggest moments.
- Cycle to Work Scheme – Save 25-39% on a new bike and accessories through salary sacrifice.
- Home & Tech Savings – Get up to 8% off on IKEA and Currys products, spreading the cost over 12 months through salary sacrifice.
- £1,000 Employee Referral Bonus – Know someone amazing? Get rewarded for bringing them on board!
- Wellbeing Support – Access to Mental Health First Aiders, plus 24/7 online GP services and an Employee Assistance Programme for you and your family.
- A Great Place to Work – We have a lovely Central London office in Holborn, and offer flexible and remote working arrangements.
At Our Future Health, we recognise the importance of having a diverse workforce and ensuring that all candidates, regardless of their background, have equitable access to our application process. We proactively encourage applicants who identify as having a disability, neurodiversity, or long-term health conditions to let us know if they require any reasonable adjustments as part of their application process.
If you do require any reasonable adjustments, please email us at talent@ourfuturehealth.org.uk
