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, 24th 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…