Senior Recovery Worker

Job overview

Liaison Psychiatry provide specialist mental health support to service users admitted to Sheffield Teaching Hospital.

The role of a Senior Recovery Worker within Liaison Psychiatry is essential to the on-going provision of high quality, evidence based mental health care.

The role includes a mixture of indpendent work delivering short term psychological interventions and collaborative work with Liaison colleagues to meet the complex needs of service users experiencing physical health and mental health problems.

A successful candidate will have excellent people skills, thinking creatively around how to engage people in high levels of distress.  Compassion and kindness are core values required for this post.

The service has excellent supervision arrangements to help you develop in your role.

Main duties of the job

• Providing short-term psychological interventions (under therapist supervision)
• Offering a ‘listening service’ (Under therapist supervision)
• Linking patients in with the local and voluntary sector at point of discharge care planning or during ward stays (also known as community resourcing) (under therapist supervision) Band 3 and above
• Indirect information gathering or ‘sweep’ of AMU (Acute Medical Unit)
• Supporting professionally-registered Liaison staff in day to day working practice (under clinical supervision of Band 5+ Liaison Nurse) for Band 4 Senior Recovery Workers
• Supportive role alongside clinical staff in ED, AMU, CDU and on general STH wards
• Taking initial referrals into the Liaison service
• Supporting patient on general wards who are detained under the Mental Health Act or being treated informally for a long stay on a general ward, with psychiatric needs

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

You will contribute to the key functions of Liaison Psychiatry by: supporting professionally registered clinicians to complete day to day acute assessments; providing timely, focused  interventions for those who present with mental health needs in the hospital setting, and  providing sign-posting support to individuals due to be discharged to the community or  expecting longer stays in hospital.

You will be using empirically informed brief interventions, based on best available evidence and under supervision, to support people who are in hospital to manage anxiety, depression, and the general impact and stress of needing to adjust to their hospital environment and/or psychical health changes. This will involve direct and indirect care to service users, under minimal supervision, and as directed by registered mental health practitioners.

You will have support from the multi-disciplinary team of Nurses, Social workers,  Occupational Therapists, Psychotherapists/Psychologists, and Doctors.

Following personal development planning and targeted training, you will be in a position to  work more autonomously in supporting service users. You will develop an underpinning  knowledge of evidence-based strategies for anxiety, depression and a range of stress  reactions, and also be able to triage and referrals as they come in from your multidisciplinary colleagues. You will also build and maintain a good working knowledge of geographically-specific services in the community and voluntary sector to support  assessing clinicians to provide strengths-based care plans and to offer sign-posting advice  to patients and Sheffield Teaching Hospital staff.

You may also act as a first point of contact for Sheffield Teaching Hospital staff, service  users, their families and/or carers, and provide a screening function to determine whether  enquiries need to be dealt with by a registered member of staff or can be resolved quickly  and effectively by information sharing with and appropriate signposting to other services.

You will work across the working age, older adult and young people sections of Liaison  Psychiatry and you will be prepared to work unsocial hours across nights and weekends to  support the clinical team.