Overview of the role
We're expanding our IT team at Bestway Healthcare!
The Major Incident Manager is responsible for leading the end-to-end response to business-critical technology incidents, restoring service as quickly and safely as possible while maintaining clear control, communication and accountability.
Working alongside the Service Desk Manager, the role will coordinate technical teams, business stakeholders and suppliers to minimise operational disruption and business impact.
The successful candidate will lead incident resolution activities, facilitate effective decision-making during high-pressure situations, and ensure lessons learned are translated into measurable improvements in service resilience, operational performance and service management maturity.
This is a key role within our growing IT function, helping to ensure the stability and reliability of technology services that support colleagues, customers and patients across Bestway Healthcare.
Main Responsibility
- Own and operate the Major Incident Management process, including severity assessment, declaration, mobilisation, escalation, recovery coordination and formal closure.
- Lead incident bridges and command structures, establish clear workstreams, maintain pace and ensure actions, decisions, risks, owners and timestamps are accurately recorded.
- Work alongside the Service Desk Manager to ensure rapid triage, effective user communications, accurate ticket management and smooth handover between frontline support and major incident command.
- Coordinate Infrastructure, Networks, Applications, Cyber Security, Digital, Data, Architecture and external suppliers to diagnose impact, contain risk and restore critical services.
- Provide timely, audience-appropriate updates to senior leaders, operational teams and affected stakeholders, clearly explaining business impact, recovery position, risks and next steps.
- Determine when executive escalation, crisis management, business continuity, cyber response or emergency change controls are required, and ensure the appropriate governance is engaged.
- Facilitate post-incident reviews, identify root-cause and process gaps, agree corrective actions and track improvements through Problem and Change Management to completion.
- Maintain major incident playbooks, contact and escalation matrices, communication templates, service impact criteria, reporting dashboards and evidence required for audit or assurance.
- Analyse incident themes, repeat failures, supplier performance and recovery effectiveness, using insight to improve monitoring, resilience, support readiness and service ownership. The role provides operational leadership and constructive challenge but has no direct reports.
The Ideal Candidate
- Proven experience managing major incidents in a medium or large organisation, working across service desk, infrastructure, applications, cloud, cyber security, networks and third-party suppliers.
- Strong knowledge of ITIL incident, major incident, problem and change management practices, with the ability to apply them pragmatically under pressure. ITIL 4 Foundation is desirable; advanced ITSM or service management qualifications are advantageous.
- Excellent leadership, facilitation and communication skills, including executive updates, technical bridge management, clear decision logging, stakeholder coordination and production of concise post-incident reports.
About the Company
With the purpose of improving the lives of our patients and customers, Bestway Healthcare supports communities across the United Kingdom and Ireland through an extensive network of community pharmacies and pharmaceutical wholesale depots. Our growth strategy combines our ambition to expand our retail pharmacy and wholesale propositions to more patients and customers, provide value to all our stakeholders and deliver a sustainable business.
Our retail pharmacy business unit operates Well Pharmacy, the largest independent retail pharmacy chain in the UK and second largest overall. With a 70-year heritage, we operate a nationwide network of over 640 pharmacies, serving over 2 million people every month and delivering over 400k consultations annually. Also forming part of the pharmacy business is John Bell & Croyden, a London-based luxury health, beauty and pharmacy specialist established in 1798, and a number of trading websites including Chemist.net.
Our wholesale business unit operates two pharmaceutical wholesale brands, Lexon and Bestway Medhub which combined support over 5,000 independent community pharmacy contractors, processing over 100m packs of medication every year making us the 4th largest pharmaceutical wholesaler in the United Kingdom. Our wholesale business unit also operates a leading appliance wholesaler, Wardle’s, a generic supplier Key Pharmaceuticals. We operate from 4 distribution centres with a fleet of vans delivering to independent pharmacies & directly to the most vulnerable patients every day.
A family-owned company, Bestway Healthcare is part of the Bestway Group, a diversified multinational family-owned business with annualised turnover in excess of £4.5 billion. Founded in 1976, the group is owned by the Pervez, Choudrey and Sheikh families, serving 12 million customers and employing over 28,000 individuals.
