Senior Mental Health Practitioner

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Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust celebrates diversity and promotes equal opportunities; we are committed to challenging and eliminating racism and other forms of discrimination and advancing and promoting equality of opportunity in the provision of services and creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe that everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect.

We take positive action to support disadvantaged groups and also particularly encourage applications from ethnic minorities, disabled and LGBTQIA+ people that are under-represented in our workforce. Furthermore we welcome applications from reservists and ex-armed forces personnel as we recognise the benefits of the values, skills, training and experience that they bring to their work with us. We encourage all applicants to share their equality information with us.

Job overview

We have 2 positions to offer in the Knowsley CMHT

These vacancies offer a position for an experienced registered mental health nurse to work in an exciting, innovative post that supports the Biopsychosocial assessments of patients to access mental health support

*This job is only suitable for an NMC Registered Mental Health Nurse.

The core working hours of this role are Mon - Fri, 9am - 5pm excluding bank
holidays

Main duties of the job

The successful applicant will work in the Secondary Mental Health setting, offering specialist Mental health assessment to those patients who have moderate to severe mental health conditions.

This role allows the practitioner to provide specialist advice, support, and assessment to patients.

This will allow timelier access to services and ensure that the patient gets the right treatment at the right time and will offer the practitioner the environment to work in an autonomous way.

The role aims to improve the experience for our patients with mental health needs to ensure they can transition between services with the best support in place.

The post holder will be an effective member of a multi-disciplinary team, effectively triaging and signposting patients into the right team or service to support them in their needs

The post holder will be supported in their role by a variety of other professionals. This includes Pharmacists, Advanced Nurse Practitioners, Clinical Leads, Responsible clinician - as well as the management team.

Working for our organisation

Mersey Care is one of the largest trusts providing physical health and mental health services in the North West, serving more than 1.4 million people across our region and are also commissioned for services that cover the North West, North Wales and the Midlands.

We offer specialist inpatient and community services that support physical and mental health and specialist inpatient mental health, learning disability, addiction and brain injury services. Mersey Care is one of only three trusts in the UK that offer high secure mental health facilities.

At the heart of all we do is our commitment to 'perfect care' - care that is safe, effective, positively experienced, timely, equitable and efficient. We support our staff to do the best job they can and work alongside service users, their families, and carers to design and develop future services together. We're currently delivering a programme of organisational and service transformation to significantly improve the quality of the services we provide and safely reduce cost as we do so.

Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

To provide a safe and effective day to day operation of the service, including the handling of clinical enquiries. The role holder will be required to attend daily referral MDT to support the triage process of referrals into secondary mental health care, so they can be signposted, or referred on to agencies as appropriate as well as face to face appointments

To undertake assessments of individual patient's difficulties, establishing risk and determining the appropriate course of action, taking into consideration all possible options. The relationship should adopt a 'partnership approach', engaging service users in the positive management of their health and wellbeing.

Work with patients to support adherence to prescribed treatments, monitoring mental health medication, taking into consideration any physical health interactions.

Provide and receive information, some of which may be contentious, sensitive, and complex to and from individuals and their families/carers and actively support as appropriate.

To collate and organise contemporaneous information about opportunities and resources in the local area which may be of benefit to patients referred to the service (e.g., voluntary and community organisations, educational and recreational opportunities). Facilitate 'sign posting' to other appropriate services and occasionally undertake very short-term interventions for patients with moderate to severe mental health difficulties.

To evaluate outcomes and maintain accurate clinical data.

Have an awareness of your own clinical competencies, knowledge base and experience and ensure that you practice within this and seek support as required.

Utilise clinical curiosity in assessing and developing treatment plans with patients. Obtaining and focussing on goal based outcomes with patients, using a holistic approach to their care and social circumstances.

To understand and process Quality Outcome Framework data.

Ensure systems/ pathways are in place to enable smooth transition between services

Regularly be involved in quality improvement activity/audit/significant event review and clinical meetings.

Facilitate joint work with Secondary Care providers , primary care and Voluntary Care Sector (VCS) to increase range of services / interventions available to the communities.

Person specification

Qualifications

Essential criteria

• Appropriate professional qualification or experience at Degree Level e.g. RMN, AHP, Social Worker
• Evidence of post registration study / continuing professional development e.g. Mentorship in Practice

Desirable criteria

• Working towards master level education

Experience/ Knowledge

Essential criteria

• Significant demonstrable post registration experience in mental health.
• Evidence of leadership and management skills.
• Evidence of experience of managing cases & case loads
• Evidence of supervising staff.
• Ability to work autonomously across the organisation/boundaries and with other agencies
• Experience of working in partnership with other agencies and service users and carers
• Experience of audit/research and working knowledge of clinical governance.
• Experience in change management and policy formulation.
• Experience of using Incident Reporting Systems e.g. DATIX
• Experience of undertaking and involvement in Serious Untoward Incident Reviews
• Evidence of experience of working with a range of people with mental health problems in a variety of health care settings.
• A demonstrated understanding of Equality and Human Rights

Skills

Essential criteria

• Able to communicate effectively both verbally and non-verbally.
• Being responsive and flexible, seeing change as an opportunity to improve services
• Ability to lead the process of standard setting and audit
• Leadership Skills
• Ability to work within a CBU management team, be able to generate own workload and ability to work to strict deadlines.
• Ability to build purposeful relationships with a range of both internal and external to the organisation.
• Proven knowledge of relevant mental health legislation.
• Demonstrate knowledge of ECC guidelines.
• Demonstrate knowledge in the concepts of mentorship, preceptorship and supervision and ability to provide education and supervision to junior staff
• Demonstrate a good knowledge of professional Codes of Conduct and Staffs' responsibility to identify gaps in their knowledge base.
• Professional attitude.
• Possess excellent listening and negotiation skills and leadership skills.
• Excellent oral and written skills
• Excellent interpersonal and organisational skills.
• The ability to lead change management
• Ability to contribute to developing care excellence within the ward / team area

VALUES

Essential criteria

• Continuous Improvement
• Accountability
• Respectfulness
• Enthusiasm
• Support
• High professional standards
• Responsive to service users
• Engaging leadership style
• Strong customer service belief
• Transparency and honesty
• Discreet
• Change oriented

Please ensure you check the email account from which you apply for all correspondence. All information regarding your application will come from apps.trac.jobs not NHS Jobs.

Only those applicants who demonstrate clearly how they meet our person specification will be shortlisted for interview.

As a Disability Confident Employer, we offer a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants who consider themselves to be disabled who meet the minimum (essential) criteria for the role in the person specification. If you would like your application to be considered under the Trust's guaranteed interview scheme you can indicate this in the personal information section of your online application form.

Should you require a reasonable adjustment to our recruitment process please email recruitment@merseycare.nhs.uk to ensure that measures can be put in place to support you.

We reserve the right to close any vacancy earlier than advertised in exceptional circumstances once we have received a high volume of applications.

The Trust expects all post holders who require an enhanced DBS for their role subscribe to the DBS Update Service. You will be required to enrol for this service for a fee of £13 per year and maintain registration. Trans applicants who require a DBS check and do not want to reveal details of their previous identity can contact the DBS Sensitive Applications Team (01516761452 or email sensitive@dbs.gsi.gov.uk) with their application number once they have completed their DBS application form. The team can prevent any previous identity showing on the DBS Certificate, unless the applicant has a conviction under their previous details in which case this will need to be disclosed.

Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.

Please be advised that the use of Artificial Intelligence on applications is monitored and if you choose to use this, you must declare this on your application form.

Employer certification / accreditation badges

Applicant requirements

You must have appropriate UK professional registration.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Documents to download

• Job Description & Person Specification (PDF, 208.9KB)
• OH Risk ID (PDF, 392.6KB)
• A Great Place to Work (PDF, 2.1MB)
• Our People Promise and Charter (PDF, 5.8MB)
• Employee Benefits (PDF, 950.7KB)