Community Perinatal Mental Health Nurse

Job overview

We are seeking to recruit an enthusiastic, energetic and clinically confident community psychiatric nurse to join our Community Perinatal Team in Southwark.  You will have experience of general adult inpatient, Mother and Baby inpatient unit, community mental health services or CAMHS. You will have experience of working with women who suffer from moderate to severe mental illness in the perinatal period.

You will be familiar with Perinatal community standards, governance and performance structures and confident in partnership work with other agencies such as Children and Family Social Services, Midwifery and Obstetric teams, CMHTs, Health Visitors and the Voluntary sector.

You will display excellent clinical knowledge and skilled practice in women with mental health disorders in the perinatal period. You will provide consistently skilled judgments in clinical work.

Working closely with your colleagues in Perinatal Mental Health Teams, you will receive support and be part of the on-going Perinatal workforce training within SLaM and London wide.  In addition, you will be part of the Pan London Community Perinatal Nurses Network.  This is a great opportunity to supervise student nurses as well as implementing new ways of working using best practice and NICE guidelines.

Main duties of the job

• Working autonomously within the parameters of the role leading on implementing the delivery of quality nursing care, contributing to the physical, psychological, social, recreational and spiritual care in a recovery focused way through therapeutic engagement and activities, and taking steps to address any issues that arise.
• Co-ordinating and evaluating collaborative patient-centred care; getting feedback and improving plans with the multi-disciplinary team (MDT).
• Providing accurate information about care in an accessible format to patients and their relatives / carers.
• Liaising and working positively with members of the multi- disciplinary team and partner organisations.
• Advocating for service users’ needs and rights within Trust policy. Encouraging and empowering service users to have an optimum level of responsibility for their individual programme of care.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Demonstrating an enhanced understanding of Mental Health signs and symptoms and an understanding of how these may present in practice including recognition of impact on patient presentation and behaviour including risk factors. Supporting junior staff and partners to develop understanding of mental health signs and symptoms and develop appropriate responses to these in practice.
• Contributing to an effective communication process with appropriate and accurate information to patients, carers, family, friends and colleagues. Engaging and listening carefully and actively and responding using appropriate language and accessible communication methods and skills. Developing communication skills to enable and support difficult conversations, acknowledging cultural differences and professional boundaries.
• Demonstrating effective clinical communication and documentation to internal and external stakeholders ensuring effective verbal and written handover of relevant and objective information. Demonstrating ability to determine key information, ability to recognize and describe effectively symptoms of mental illness, distress or of a deteriorating patient, and ability to escalate issues of concerns effectively and in a timely manner.