Senior Mental Health Practitioner

Job overview

Are you a dynamic, motivated mental health professional with strong leadership skills and a passion for delivering high-quality patient care?

Bolton Mental Health Liaison Service is seeking to recruit an experienced Senior Practitioner to provide clinical leadership within our well-established and highly regarded service. Working alongside the Team Manager, you will play a key role in supporting service delivery, staff development, and the continued growth of the team.

The Service has been established for over 10 years and consists of a dynamic, supportive, and welcoming multidisciplinary team, including psychiatrists, senior practitioners, practitioners, and a clinical psychologist. The service benefits from senior-level representation within both local and Greater Manchester strategic developments for liaison psychiatry services.

Working in partnership with Royal Bolton Hospital,  our practitioners have the unique opportunity to support individuals experiencing both mental and physical health difficulties. This collaborative approach enables staff to develop specialist knowledge and skills across a wide range of clinical specialties while providing expert mental health assessment, intervention, and support within the acute hospital setting.

In addition to direct clinical work, Mental Health Liaison practitioners contribute to the education and development of acute trust staff through teaching, consultation, and collaborative care initiatives.

Main duties of the job

As a Senior Practitioner, you will maintain a strong clinical presence while developing and enhancing your leadership and management skills. You will support the Team Manager in ensuring safe, effective, and high-quality service delivery.

Key responsibilities include:

• Providing clinical leadership and support to the multidisciplinary team.

• Delivering supervision and professional support to practitioners.

• Supporting service development and quality improvement initiatives.

• Attending and representing the service at meetings in the Team Manager's absence.

• Undertaking audits and reviewing clinical processes to support continuous improvement.

• Contributing to the investigation and review of incidents, complaints, and serious events.

• Maintaining a clinical caseload and delivering high-quality patient care.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Provide clinical leadership, supervision, support and consultation to nursing staff and MDT staff in the Bolton Mental Health Liaison Team, in line with relevant clinical pathway as outlined within the operational procedures.
• Support the management of the integrated multidisciplinary 24-hour mental health  service. They will provide clinical leadership and patient interventions focusing on relapse prevention, early discharge and improved quality of life for patients referred to the service.
• Be expected to support the band 6 practitioners in the assessment of children and adults attending both the paediatric and adult A & E department; with emphasis on knowledge base across the age spectrum.
• Provide a service to the wards, assessing individuals with a range of complex needs, such as organic and functional illness working  across the age spectrum including, Children and Young People, working age adults and a range of illnesses associated with people from later life.

In addition, there will be a requirement to assess individuals with learning disabilities.

• Be expected to provide support and training to the acute hospital staff regarding recognising mental illness and appropriate onward actions to be taken.
• Offer assessment, support and care for individuals brought to Bolton's identified Place of Safety facilities in relation to Section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
• Deputise for Team Manager in his/her absence and take on any delegated management duties and required.
• Participate in the the Directorate Bronze on call rota.