Careers in Health and Social Care at Level 6
Managing quality, resources, safety and people in care services, for practitioners moving from delivering care to running it.
The fieldWhere degree-level work sits
Health and social care has a clear line between the regulated professions, whose members are registered and whose titles are protected, and the management and coordination roles that surround them. A registered nurse, social worker or allied health professional qualifies by an approved degree and registration; a registered manager of a care service in England is approved by the regulator on the basis of experience, competence and a relevant qualification, of which a Level 5 diploma in leadership has been the customary one. Above and around that role sit service, quality and operations managers for whom degree-level study is the expectation and a Level 6 award the natural next step from a Level 5.
Roles that ordinarily ask for study at this level
- Registered manager or deputy manager of a residential, nursing, domiciliary or supported-living service
- Service manager or area manager overseeing several care settings for a provider
- Quality and compliance lead preparing services for regulatory inspection and running improvement plans
- Operations or resource manager in a care provider, hospice, community health organisation or charity
- Commissioning or contracts officer in a local authority or integrated care body working with care providers
- Practice development or training lead responsible for staff competence across a service
The diplomaWhat Level 6 adds
The OTHM Health and Social Care Management diploma takes a senior carer or team leader who already runs a shift, a unit or a service and asks them to write about it as a manager: how quality is defined and measured, how resources are allocated and defended, how health and safety is assured, how a team is led rather than supervised, and how evidence is gathered through a research-methods unit that many learners later describe as the most useful thing they did. Those are the competencies inspectors and providers look for in the grades above registered manager.
For someone entering care management from another field, the diploma provides the sector-specific grounding that a general management award would not: the regulatory context, the quality frameworks, the particular ethics of resource decisions when the resource is someone's care.
ProgrammesThe diploma on this site in this field
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