Community Consultant Old Age Psychiatrist

Job overview

As a Consultant Old Age Psychiatrist working for Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust you will be responsible for ensuring that our service users’ needs are met through the delivery of high quality care.

As a leader of the outpatient multi-disciplinary team at The Beckett Unit, Hollins Park, you will manage the community mental health team and Memory service, providing clinical care to service users who have been referred for older adults mental health care and specialist cognitive assessment.

You will work closely with a wide range of clinical and professional disciplines in order to deliver holistic care by completing assessments of new referrals to the team, making formulations and managing their treatment in order to optimise the quality of life of the service users under your caseload.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will be the Responsible Clinician for patients in their caseload within the Later Life & Memory Service based at The Beckett Unit. There are allocated GP surgeries for each caseload within the service and these are allocated to ensure equity in terms of number of referrals. In line with New Ways of Working, the post holder will provide a consultative, supervisory and supportive role to the multidisciplinary team’s work. They will take an active part in the clinical work of the team and a lead role in the development of the service.

The post holder will be expected to provide leadership to the Team whose role is to provide assessment, management and support to older adults who have been referred for assessment of cognitive function and functional mental disorders. Practitioners within the team will support access to services in a timely manner, as well as ensure arrangements are in place to enhance smooth pathways between primary care and secondary services. The post holder will be enabled to work in a consultative manner, being accessible to team members, GP and primary care staff, patients and carers, for the provision of expert advice and interventions in a timely manner. The post holder will operate within multi-disciplinary integrated and co-located teams, which including Health staff and Social services staff. The post holder will be expected to be part of the allocation procedure within the team and be responsive and flexible to the needs of the team.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

The overall pathway for the older adult service at Warrington LLAMS is as below:

-    All referrals are added to the Assessment pathway upon receipt and referrals are autonomously screened by senior nursing staff from the team on a daily basis. This practitioner may seek support from team management for certain referrals or discuss with the Consultant if greater medical oversight is felt to be required on a case by base basis.

- For all accepted referrals, a screening call is completed within 72 hours and an initial assessment is then completed by a Band 6 practitioner or above within two weeks.

-    Once the initial assessment has been completed then a diagnostic appointment is made with the Consultant Psychiatrist in order to establish the diagnosis and management plan.

-    Referrals are received from the GP/first response service/other medical specialty

-    For cognitive assessments, once the initial assessment is completed by the postholder or their trainee medic, if a diagnosis of dementia is confirmed and treatment is commenced the patient will be booked in for Memory Team review at 11 weeks, 3 months and then 6 monthly thereafter. Any confirmed diagnoses of Mild Cognitive Impairment are discharged from the service with appropriate advice. If further investigations are required these are requested prior to commencing treatment.

The over-65 catchment population in the Warrington area as a whole is 41,115 (19.43% of the whole population in Warrington). The annual number of referrals to the Warrington Later Life & Memory Service as a whole was 1251 between October 2024 and September 2025. The mean number of referrals per month was 104 per month. There are two MDT’s within the Warrington Later Life & Memory Service and the number of referrals to the postholder’s team is approximately 50% of these total figures. The current total caseload for the postholder’s MDT is 1019.

In addition, there is a separate Care Home Liaison team caseload which the postholder will manage along with care home liaison team practitioners and the current caseload size for this is 45, with the average number of referrals per month over the past 12 months to this team being 33.

Core Trainees in Psychiatry and Higher Trainees in Old Age Psychiatry (or Dual Higher Trainees in Old Age & General Adult Psychiatry) are usually placed with Warrington LLAMS. The post holder’s MDT is usually assigned a Core Trainee in Old Age Psychiatry and the other MDT based at Warrington LLAMS, led by Dr Rosemary Cameron, is assigned a Higher Trainee.

The postholder covers 18 GP surgeries in the Warrington area, covering the South and West of Warrington. 23 care homes are covered by the postholder, including three dementia plus homes.