The Department of Health and Social Care is offering up to £200,000 for the next chief executive of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
The department is looking for an “experienced leader with a strong record of delivering within a complex and rapidly evolving environment” to head up the medicines regulator, according to the job advert.
“This [is] an exciting and challenging time to take on leadership of the agency. The successful individual will need to bring the whole organisation together to respond to the opportunities and challenges created by ever faster innovation in medical interventions and the need for greater operating efficiency,” the job advert says.
The chief exec will manage the agency’s annual income of £170m and lead its 1,300-strong staff.
They will be responsible for ensuring “excellent standards and service in the agency’s core business”, which includes handling more than 8,000 medicine marketing authorisations and 1,000 clinical trials licence applications per year.
The successful candidate’s responsibilities will also include driving the “ongoing transformation of the agency’s role, operations, culture and digital infrastructure” and responding to the "unprecedented evolution in medicines and medical technology". The job ad highlights recent advances in personalised medicine, genomics and artificial intelligence as particular areas of interest, noting that the chief exec must "continuously consider how to promote innovation in medical interventions whilst protecting patients".
Applicants must be able to demonstrate “outstanding leadership capability with evidence of having delivered business transformation in an environment of ambiguity and change”, according to the job ad.
They must also have outstanding communication skills; experience “creating and delivering a vision and a strategy for a complex organisation, developing its reputation nationally/internationally”; and an “appreciation of medical innovation and technology”.
The successful candidate will succeed June Raine, who is due to step down later this year. Raine, who was previously the agency’s director of vigilance and risk management of medicines, became interim chief exec in 2019 before being appointed to the position permanently in 2021.
Raine had “played a crucial part” in setting up rolling reviews after the Covid pandemic started that ensured the UK was the first nation in the world to authorise the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford University/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines, DHSC said at the time.