Carer Champion

at  Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Carer Champion – Inpatient Rehabilitation Service
Do you have a special interest in supporting family members to better enable them to understand their relative’s mental illness and give carers more information about the support they are entitled to under the Care Act 2015? To work collaboratively with carers, patients, and teams?
LPFT’s inpatient rehabilitation service is recruiting a substantive, full-time carer’s champion. This is an exciting new role in the service.
We are looking for a highly motivated and enthusiastic individual to join our team. The successful candidate will work closely with other Carer Champions across the division and organisation to support families and carers whose loved ones have been admitted to our inpatient wards at Discovery House and Maple Lodge. The role will support the teams to ensure that relatives and carers are fully involved in patient care, ensuring relatives are part of the patient pathway, and working in conjunction with the relevant team to signpost carers and relatives to appropriate support and information. We are looking for someone who can understand and relate to the needs of family and carers using LPFT inpatient services and who is willing to work flexibly to attend carer support and education groups alongside carers.
If you enjoy working differently and want to make a difference in people’s lives, then this may be the opportunity for you.
It is essential that you are able to travel independently.
Remaining in regular contact with Carers to gain formal and informal feedback on services. Ensuring Carers are aware of and invited to participate in engagement events and support groups.
Provide information on health promotion to carers and ensure that any health and wellbeing needs are identified and appropriately addressed through signposting to relevant services. To provide or signpost carers to information about mental illness, treatment, and other relevant information and resources in the community. To liaise with other colleagues and organisations for and on behalf of carers and, where relevant, ensure carers are signposted to an advocacy service. To liaise regularly with Head of Carers and Relatives to ensure up-to-date information is being disseminated and seek clinical supervision with them to ensure professional development. Ensure carers receive appropriate and timely information. To provide emotional and practical support to carers. This will be achieved in various ways, but particularly by providing individual contact with carers and ensuring Carer Leads are doing the same.
Promoting Carer Awareness
Champion carers statutory rights and needs and ensure that any national and local information is cascaded to colleagues and local teams/service areas. Support initiatives aimed at promoting carer identification, such as the Triangle of Care, John’s Campaign and the development of the Carers passport.
Ensure the role of the Carer Champion is recognised and valued with
Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health services and a number of learning disability, autism and social care services in the county of Lincolnshire. Employing around 2,800 staff, and serving a population of over 766,000, our people lie at the heart of everything we do.
You could be part of a Trust rated by staff as one of the best mental health and learning disability trusts in England, in an area heralded as a fantastic place to live and work. We firmly believe the key to high quality care is a contented workforce. This is reflected in our Care Quality Commission rating of ‘outstanding’ for well-led and ‘good’ overall. In the most recent National NHS Staff Survey, our staff rated us as the number one trust nationally for staff morale and one of the top scoring NHS Trusts in the Midlands for being compassionate and inclusive. We’re really proud of this!
We are also leading the way in transforming care, with multi-million-pound transformation of patient environments and radical redesign of community services.
This is the time to join and help redesign our services of the future. We offer options for flexible working and provide a wide range of training and promotion opportunities in all professions. We support and celebrate diversity, have active staff networks groups and are always looking at what more we can do to support our staff.
Responsibilities for direct/indirect patient care: To provide guidance and practical support to carers to better enable them to support their relative’s plan of care/treatment. Recognising the emotional impact of caring for somebody experiencing significant distress, provide emotional support and a listening ear for carers.
Where appropriate, support carers by improving and facilitating their access to community support and meaningful activity.
Responsibilities for policy and service development implementation: Assist in the planning processes – e.g. consultation, representation, planning, and decision making processes. Help pilot new ideas and innovations and contribute to evaluations. To be able to evaluate their own work and identify ‘gaps’ in the service, and to forward that on to Quality Lead and Service Managers to enable the planning of future developments and initiatives to meet the needs of carers. Assist in the evaluation of the current extent of service provision for carers.

Keep up-to-date records of all carer project work, carer reviews, and all related contact with carers and staff members.
To work collaboratively with teams in Lincoln and Boston to improve carer relations and outcome