Director of Safeguarding and Risk

Director of Safeguarding and Risk | Full- Time, Remote

About Us!

Kooth is a fast-growing organization with a social purpose. After 20 years of successful services in the UK, we are rapidly expanding in the United States!

OUR MISSION: To provide welcoming and effective digital mental health support to students proactively.

Using the collective insight from nearly 1 million hours of professional intervention, we guide students to three areas of evidenced-based support: self-guided, community/peer interactions, and chat-based counseling provided by licensed Counselors. These areas of assistance are designed to match each individual student’s current needs, wants and goals as well as identify and refer to a higher level of care when needed.

If you are seeking a fun, professional culture, in a fast-growing company, look no further - Apply today!

Role Objective: Responsible for leading the safeguarding strategy for Kooth Behavioral Health services. Accountable for ensuring that the Kooth offer is safe and in line with regulatory frameworks, both locally and nationally; and for ensuring that policies and procedures are fully embedded with appropriate assurances in place for internal and external stakeholders.

Primary Job Responsibilities:

Management & Leadership:

• Responsible for the overall leadership and management of the risk functions across North America.
• Leads and builds a high performing risk team and ensures they are delivering key strategic objectives.
• Ensures that US practices are aligned with the wider Kooth framework and works closely with the UK counterpart to ensure that this is embedded.
• Sets a tone of compassionate leadership providing supportive, challenging, and demanding high standards in line with business expectations.
• Ensures that all team members are appropriately trained and supported to be able to lead on designated areas of responsibility within the risk functions.

Analytics, Reporting & Insights:

• Prepares monthly reports for the VP and wider team to demonstrate team activity, trends and challenges including improvement plans.
• Supports the VP in ensuring that any safeguarding specific risks within the organization are visible to the executive team and board of directors.
• Uses data from a variety of sources to produce narratives to explain how risk is increased and mitigated. This includes both quantitative and qualitative data from both internal and external sources.
• Leads on the incident reporting framework relating to practice, including any investigations and root cause analysis plus reporting of ‘lessons learned’ as appropriate.

Stakeholder Management:

• Engages, influences and partners across the organization, as well as externally, to ensure a clear understanding of the responsibilities of the risk team.
• Represents the company at industry conferences and meetings, building relationships with key stakeholders while using expertise and experience to demonstrate the company’s commitment to ensuring safety for vulnerable service users.
• Ensures that risk policies are developed in conjunction with relevant local stakeholders as required and that any challenges to implementation are appropriately managed through transparent and supportive conversations, leading to mutual resolution.
• Responsible for the timely and accurate provision of relevant risk activity to local commissioners and stakeholders in line with contract compliance requirements.
• Leads on the provision of a timely response to data requests from local and national stakeholders as appropriate (including police) in line with duty of care.

Behavioral Health:

• Remains up to date with relevant evidence-based practice in the behavioral health domain, generally and within digital health specifically.
• Ensures that clinical policies and procedures are fit for purpose and in line with regulatory and best practice frameworks regarding any risk elements.
• Ensures an appropriate level of governance for relevant teams where there is a risk element, including product, content and service delivery (includes auditing as appropriate).
• Supports the Risk Team Specialists in conducting practice audits as appropriate to role as part of the overall governance function.

Risk Management:

• Ensures the appropriate application of relevant risk legislation across the organization, working closely with the legal and Risk team to identify and address any gaps.
• Leads the risk team in establishing, embedding and reviewing risk processes, including risk management, risk reporting and Risk prevention.
• Updates the risk register monthly.
• Analyses the organizational needs in relation to risk training and makes recommendations based on this analysis and other relevant data.
• Offers specialist advice to internal staff as the company expert on risks and its applicability within youth behavioral health (including regarding vulnerable adults).
• Leads on the implementation of actions to mitigate identified risks.
• Oversees the development of all policies relating to risk and leads on the implementation of those policies.
• Leads the on-call provision, ensuring that Practitioners are adequately supported in dealing with risks, which may include being part of the on call rotation.
• Leads on the implementation of ‘lessons learned’ actions following risk incidents.

Education & Experience Requirements:

• Master’s Degree or higher in a relevant field such as Psychology, Social Work, Medicine, Mental Health, or Counseling.
• Direct experience working within the youth behavioral health sector.
• 7+ years of experience managing risk in a relevant field, with demonstrable knowledge of regulatory frameworks/challenges in relation to youth behavioral health.
• Clinical license in a related field preferred.

Compensation: $130,000-$160,000 based on experience

Here are some of the exciting benefits you will receive as a team member at Kooth:

• Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision benefits
• Prescription drug coverage
• Generous paid time off
• 8 paid holidays plus two, half-day holidays (Christmas Eve and New Years Eve)
• 401(k) retirement plan

Kooth provides equal employment opportunities to all people without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, protected medical condition, genetic information, military service, veteran status, or any other status or characteristic protected by law.