Yvonne Higgins

Chief Nursing Officer, Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board (Panel Group 4)

Yvonne Higgins is the Chief Nursing Officer for the Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board. Previously she was the Deputy Director of Nursing at Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust. With over three decades of experience in Nursing, she has been instrumental in the implementation of the Nursing Quality Assurance framework and developed processes for transparent consistent measurement of key Nursing Quality Indicators across both organisations.

Yvonne is a change agent who is passionate to support nurses’ health and wellbeing and at the same time keeps patients at the heart of what she designs and implements. In her previous roles, Yvonne has achieved agreement from providers for a collaborative LMS quality dashboard and demonstrated a positive impact on saving babies lives. She led the way to develop a 2-year quality improvement project ‘Safer Provision And Care Excellence (SPACE)’ within Nursing Homes which demonstrated significant impact and engagement and a reduction in harm. Further to this, Yvonne supported the CCG and a local provider to move out of ‘special measures’.