Category Manager

Job Title: Category Manager

Function: Commercial – Medical Technologies

 Hybrid Worker – Expectation is two days per week on site at our Wakefield office.

Contract type: 9 Month Fixed Term Contract

Salary: Offered on a starting salary of £47,874 with the potential to increase to £56,322 over the course of three years. 

Closing Date: Tuesday, 24^th November 2026

NHS Supply Chain currently has an opportunity for a Category Lead to join our team during an exciting period of transformation, working to make it easier for the NHS to put patients first.

Our Category Manager roles are senior category leadership positions with responsibility for transforming and leading nationally critical product categories. Working closely with Category Lead colleagues, you will set the vision, strategic direction, and culture for your category teams, supporting both continuity of supply and future growth while embedding best practice tools and processes to deliver world class category management.

These roles are pivotal to our future strategic delivery and require agile thinking, creativity, and the ability to operate at pace in a complex and evolving environment. You will balance competing priorities, respond to changing demographics and system pressures, and ensure that category strategies support the delivery of safe, high quality patient care.

As a Category Manager, you will develop and implement category strategies that strengthen the supply chain, reduce risk, create competitive advantage, and deliver sustainable savings. Through a robust approach to product range management and routes to market, and by working in close partnership with key internal and external stakeholders, you will create product groupings that maximise value for both NHS customers and NHS Supply Chain.

You will also be responsible for building strong, cross functional relationships across the organisation and with external stakeholders. By identifying and implementing improvements to ways of working, you will drive efficiencies, enhance service delivery, and ensure improved value and outcomes for NHS customers.

Every day you will … 

• Manage a category plan/program in line with the organisations’ commercial strategy ensuring realisation of synergies, like cost savings and risk-reduction, and optimisation of the category delivery, while reporting to senior colleagues.
• Support framework development, optimisation and preparation for renewal and strategic development to meet customer needs and in alignment with the NHS 10-year plan.

• Leverage resilience, innovation, sustainability and future pathways discussions with suppliers as part of ongoing and frequent Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) activities.
• Work in close collaboration with the clinical team to ensure framework product and service offerings provide the right opportunities for customers and meet quality, cost and time considerations.

• Support senior leaders to build and optimise important relationships and inter-actions with external and internal stakeholders, including key decision makers, regulators, public organisations, governmental institutions, suppliers, NHS providers, professional communities, and customer and patient groups. Work with guidance from senior colleagues.

What can we offer you?

We want to reward you for your passion, enthusiasm, and hard work so we offer much more than a competitive salary.

• Hybrid working opportunities, giving you the flexibility to work collaboratively in the office and remotely.  

• We recognise our employees’ hard work and contributions with annual bonus schemes, long service, and colleague recognition awards. 

• 27 days holiday plus bank holidays

• We are dedicated to your development, through in-house training, support, and access to external qualifications to maximise your potential.

• A focus on your well-being offering 1 day of paid well-being leave and free access to the 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme

• Generous pension scheme (with us contributing 12% when you contribute 6%)

• Access to our Flexible Benefits Scheme, where you can choose from a variety of benefits such as Life Insurance, Critical Illness Cover, Income Protection, Health Cash Plan, Dental Insurance, and additional pension contributions that suit you.

• 2 days of paid volunteering leave allowing you to give back to your community. 

• Access to many discounts from the Blue Light Card to NHS Discounts.

NHS Supply Chain, who are we?

Our role is to support the NHS to save lives and improve health. We are a part of the NHS family, and our role is to source, deliver and supply healthcare products, services and food for NHS trusts and healthcare organisations across England and Wales. 

We serve every NHS Trust and operate a national network of distribution centres, managing relationships with more than a thousand suppliers and delivering more than 8,000,000 orders each year to more than 17,000 locations. Doing all of this on behalf of the NHS gives NHS staff more time to focus on their main priority of providing excellent patient care.

What skills will help you thrive in this role?

• Works without supervision and provides technical guidance when required on analysing data trends for use in reports to help guide decision making.Uses clear and effective verbal communications skills without supervision and provides technical guidance when required on expressing ideas, requesting actions and formulating plans or policies.
• Uses comprehensive knowledge and skills to negotiate independently while providing guidance and training to others on how to help the organisation by obtaining consensus between two or more internal or external parties who may have different interests.
• Communicates with other people without requiring supervision and provides technical guidance when required on speaking in a clear, concise, and compel-ling manner.
• This role requires a commitment to occasional travel to Sheffield and Nottingham to support SRM activity and attend team training and development sessions.

Our Inclusive Commitment 

At NHS Supply Chain, we are committed to building an inclusive environment where difference is not only valued, but celebrated, giving everyone the opportunity to thrive in their career. Developing our people is key to our success, so if this role sounds like the right next step in your career but your experience doesn’t match perfectly with the job advert, we encourage you to still apply. 

Struggling to complete our application form, and require additional support? Reach out to our Talent Acquisition team at careers@supplychain.nhs.uk who will be happy to help you with alternative ways to apply.

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