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The HCS Director, Patient Safety provides strategic and operational leadership for patient safety and high reliability across an expanding UNC Health system which, in 2026, includes 20 hospitals serving patients from all 100 North Carolina counties with 170,000 hospitalizations and 4.2 million doctor’s office visits annually. The Director designs, implements, and continuously improves the UNC Health system-wide operating system for identifying and prioritizing safety risk, preventing harm, learning from events and everyday work, strengthening safety culture, and ensuring that corrective actions are effective and sustained.
The Director leads the infrastructure supporting UNC Health’s high-reliability transformation, including its participation in the Press Ganey Zero Harm 24/7 program, in partnership with system executives, entity leaders, clinical and operational teams, and the Board. The Director has direct functional responsibility for patient safety support across the UNC Health system. The Director leads a system patient safety department with authority to deploy team members across sites based on risk, serious events, workload, and organizational priorities.
Scope and workforce responsibility are expected to grow as UNC Health acquires and opens additional hospitals and sites of care. Reporting to the HCS Executive Director, Patient Safety & Accreditation, the Director serves as a trusted advisor and coach to executive, clinical, operational, and governance leaders. The Director partners closely with HCS Director, Accreditation, Risk Management, Quality, Infection Prevention, Nursing, Medical Staff, Human Resources, Workforce Safety, Pharmacy, Information Services, patient and family leaders, and others.
The Director promotes a fair and just culture, systems thinking, psychological safety, transparency, and shared learning consistent with UNC Health’s mission, values, and standards of conduct.
1. UNC Health system-wide patient safety strategy and operating system: Develops and directs the UNC Health system-wide patient safety strategy, roadmap, governance, and portfolio of work. Establishes common standards, roles, workflows, tools, reporting, and escalation pathways that enable consistent risk reduction and learning across entities and care settings while allowing appropriate local adaptation. 2.
High-reliability transformation: Leads the design and coordination of the UNC Health system-wide infrastructure supporting UNC Health’s high-reliability journey and participation in Zero Harm 24/7. Translates executive and board commitments into an actionable implementation roadmap, leader expectations, capability-building strategy, communication, measures, and sustainment plan. Advises sponsors and operational leaders on adoption, barriers, and course correction; operational leaders retain accountability for embedding high reliability in daily work. 3.
Proactive safety-risk identification and mitigation: Establishes a risk-focused approach for identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and mitigating current and emerging safety threats. Integrates event data, near misses, safety culture findings, frontline concerns, claims and risk information, regulatory findings, clinical outcomes, and proactive risk assessments to identify system vulnerabilities and target UNC Health system-wide action. 4.
Safety event learning and review: Partners with Risk Management to govern and continuously improve the safety event reporting platform, serious safety event classification, and RCA/Learning from Defects processes. Has authority within established governance to require event review, establish review and documentation standards, determine the appropriate level of review, deploy patient safety staff, and escalate concerns about timeliness, rigor, participation, or conclusions. 5.
Corrective-action reliability and organizational learning: Owns the UNC Health system-wide process for follow-up, evidence of completion, effectiveness assessment, and sustainability monitoring of patient safety action plans. Identifies recurring and cross-entity risks, facilitates shared learning, catalogs effective interventions, and promotes spread of successful practices across the system. 6. Safety Culture and Just Culture: Owns the UNC Health system-wide patient safety culture measurement and improvement strategy and the system Just Culture program.
Partners with clinical, operational, education, culture, and human resource leaders to develop leader capability for fair, consistent, and learning-oriented response to events; analyzes culture data and disparities; advises leaders on improvement priorities; and monitors adoption and impact. 7. TeamSTEPPS and safety capability: Owns the UNC Health system-wide TeamSTEPPS strategy and partners with clinical, operational, education, culture, and human resource leaders to embed communication, teamwork, escalation, and reliability skills in onboarding, leader development, and daily work.
Develops complementary patient safety, systems-thinking, and high-reliability education and coaching. 8. Executive and board advising: Serves as a trusted patient safety and high-reliability advisor to system and entity executives, medical and nursing leaders, and governance bodies. Synthesizes complex information, communicates material safety risk, recommends action, and escalates significant or unresolved threats through hospital executive leadership and the Unified Quality chain of command. 9.
Cross-functional partnership: Builds effective partnership with Risk Management while maintaining clear functional responsibilities and decision rights. Collaborates across Accreditation, Quality, Infection Prevention, Workforce Safety, Pharmacy, Facilities, Information Services, clinical operations, patient experience, and other functions to address risks that cross organizational boundaries. 10. Patient and family engagement: Partners with patient- and family-engagement leaders to incorporate the perspectives of patients, families, and caregivers in safety governance, event learning, improvement design, communication, and evaluation, consistent with confidentiality and legal requirements. 11.
Department and resource leadership: Leads a geographically distributed system patient safety department. Defines professional practice and service standards; has authority to allocate and deploy staff across entities; establishes clear entity relationships; and monitors service quality, productivity, responsiveness, and outcomes. 12. Talent and capability development: Selects, coaches, mentors, and evaluates patient safety leaders and staff.
Builds onboarding, competency assessment, continuing education, cross-training, succession planning, and career development systems that create depth of safety expertise and a flexible UNC Health system-wide team. 13. Measurement and improvement: Defines and monitors measures of harm, serious events, reporting and learning system performance, review quality and timeliness, corrective action reliability, culture, workforce capability, and high reliability adoption.
Uses quantitative and qualitative data to guide strategy, evaluate impact, and improve the patient safety program. 14. Fiscal and administrative stewardship: Owns and manages a Unified Quality patient safety budget including operating and capital plans, technology and analytic resources, education, vendors, consultants, and other program investments. Adjusts priorities and resources to support risk reduction, growth, effectiveness, and financial stewardship. 15.
Leadership contribution: Participates in Unified Quality and UNC Health leadership teams, councils, and strategic initiatives. Maintains current expertise in safety science, human factors, high reliability, and national patient safety priorities and represents UNC Health in relevant external forums. Other Information Education
Bachelor’s degree required. Master’s degree preferred. Licensure/Certification
Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS) required within two years of hire. Current clinical licensure is preferred but not required. Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ), human factors, high reliability, improvement science, or comparable relevant certification preferred.
Professional Experience
Seven (7) years of progressively responsible experience in patient safety, health care quality, risk management, clinical operations, human factors, safety science, or a closely related field, including at least five (5) years of management or progressively responsible leadership experience. Experience leading patient safety or high-reliability work across multiple hospitals, campuses, or care settings and advising senior executives is strongly preferred.
Demonstrated experience leading complex event reviews, system-level risk reduction, culture change, multidisciplinary improvement, and health system-wide or multi-entity implementation is required. Knowledge/Skills/and Abilities
- Advanced knowledge of patient safety science, systems thinking, human factors, high-reliability principles, safety culture, Just Culture, event analysis, proactive risk assessment, and reliable improvement methods.
- Demonstrated ability to define functional strategy, build health system infrastructure and governance, lead a complex portfolio, and translate high-reliability concepts into operating practices and measurable outcomes.
- High degree of leadership skill, executive presence, judgment, discretion, emotional intelligence, and political acumen; ability to advise, coach, challenge, and influence senior leaders without relying solely on direct authority.
- Strong people-management capability, including organization design, workforce planning, resource deployment, performance management, mentoring, succession planning, and development of high-performing teams.
- Ability to synthesize event, culture, operational, clinical, and risk information; recognize weak signals and systemic patterns; prioritize risk; and develop clear, actionable recommendations.
- Expert facilitation, interviewing, negotiation, consensus-building, and conflict-resolution skills; ability to lead sensitive multidisciplinary reviews and maintain focus on systems and learning.
- Understanding of legal protections, confidentiality, disclosure, and the distinct but interdependent responsibilities of Patient Safety, Risk Management, Legal, Quality, and operational leadership.
- Ability to lead effectively during serious events and other high-pressure situations and to travel throughout North Carolina, including with limited notice, to support entity response and learning. Job Details Legal Employer: NCHEALTH Entity: Shared Services Organization Unit: Hospital Quality Management Work Type: Full Time Standard Hours Per Week: 40.00 Work Assignment Type: Onsite Work
Day Job Location of Job: US:NC:Morrisville Exempt From Overtime: Exempt: Yes This position is employed by NC Health (Rex Healthcare, Inc., d/b/a NC Health), a private, fully-owned subsidiary of UNC Health Care System, in a department that provides shared services to operations across UNC Health Care; except that, if you are currently a UNCHCS State employee already working in a designated shared services department, you may remain a UNCHCS State employee if selected for this job.
Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, status as a protected veteran or political affiliation. UNC Health makes reasonable accommodations for applicants' and employees' religious practices and beliefs, as well as applicants and