Lead Mental Health Practitioner

at  Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust

We are recruiting 4x Mental Health/Learning Disability Nurses and 3x Allied Health Professionals (Social Workers / Occupational Therapists)
The service will be an alternative to hospital admission, with the aim to support CYP mental health within the community where an admission to an inpatient hospital may not be in their best interest or could be avoided with more intensive community support.
Young people accessing the service are typically experiencing severe mental illness such as psychosis, depression, an affective disorder, anxiety disorder, neurodevelopmental disorder or serious emotional difficulties and behaviour such as self-harm, suicidal feelings, or thoughts of hurting others where risk is deemed as high.
Operational hours will be 8am - 10pm, 7 days a week, 365 days, for C&YP between the ages of 12-18 years old, who reside in Bexley, Bromley, and Greenwich boroughs. C&YP may or may not be known to CAMHS services previously and C&YP under the age of 12 will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The service is located within the CAMHS Crisis Pathway alongside the CAMHS Liaison and Crisis Team (CLiC) and the CAMHS Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) Team. You will work closely with colleagues within the pathway and tri-borough community CAMHS services, colleagues across the South London Partnership, acute hospitals, social care, schools and the police.
The post-holder will be a clinical specialist practitioner and their main focus is to provide clinical input to support the smooth operation of the service.
A range of brief interventions will be provided by the service incorporating NICE guidance and evidence-based research and practice and depending on the young person’s need, risk, and response to treatment. The service will offer 2-6 week crisis intervention which can include stabilisation, assessment, formulation, and brief therapeutic work. Visits will take place in community settings and at the young persons home.
They will be expected to support the clinical leadership of the team and also support other clinicians on the specific shift they are co-ordinating ensuring a recovery approach keeps the service user and carer at the centre of all decision making. They must ensure that views and contributions from all relevant professionals are taken into consideration when applying organisational standards to the team.
Service need may require you to work across the pathway.
The post holder will be part of an ongoing development of a tri borough CAMHS Brief Intervention Home Treatment team and support the maintenance of safe governance structures across the pathway.
Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.
We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.
Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families. This is strengthened by our new values:
We’re Kind
We’re Fair
We Listen

We Care

• Provide high quality, high intensity, and specialist service intervention to young people in the right place at the right time; promoting choice, the young persons/significant others voice and hopefulness to ensure a recovery orientated approach.
• To provide a service where equality, diversity and inclusion underpins care and operational policy; ensuring young people and their families cultural, religious, and spiritual needs are considered.
• Be responsible for the full assessment of care needs of patients presenting with a wide variety of clinical conditions. Following this, the post-holder will be responsible for planning and referring on for appropriate follow up where necessary.
• To be responsible for organising and prioritising own and others workload in the day to day allocation of work.
• To be able to effectively manage an emotionally demanding workload often under pressure and involving multiple stakeholders who may present with high expressed emotion and increased service pressures.
• Support junior team members to prioritise referrals and clinical duties effectively, to promote safe and effective practice and clinical responsiveness.
• Support and develop the clinical skills of junior team members, particularly in relation to the safe and appropriate use of positive risk taking.
• Ensure that collection of required data to inform key clinical performance indicators.
• To have organisational knowledge of Trust protocols and procedures and adhere to them, particularly in relation to the monitoring and administration of medicine (Nursing) and Safeguarding Children upholding a Think Family approach to promote and initiate any actions to safeguard vulnerable children and adults.
• To ensure the safe maintenance and sharing of accurate oral and written communication, clinical records, and electronic records to a high standard, and that they are stored and accessed appropriately at all times of service users and their significant others.
• To support the senior management team for the service and to participate in working groups or service development forums to develop policies, protocols, or guidelines relevant to the multidisciplinary / multi agency clinical team.
• To assist, where required, the team manager in the recruitment and selection of staff within the team.
• Provide a specialist consultation service to referring clinicians and clinical teams, assisting them in decision making in difficult and complex cases.
• To undertake service audit and evaluation within the team, taking responsibility to involve and negotiate with clinical and non-clinical team staff within a quality improvement framework.
• To work closely with Trust and external stake holders and other professional colleagues to ensure high quality and effective service provision according to local objectives and joint care strategies and to maintain effective working relationships.
• To deputise when required in the absence of the clinical leads / team manager and delegate appropriately to other members of the team.
• To ensure effective risk management at team level by accident / incident reporting, assessing, and controlling risk and ensuring residual risks are added to the Trust register.
• Be required to teach nursing and allied-health students and staff, both in formal and informal settings.

Please refer the Job description for details