This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced and motivated Peer Support Worker to join our friendly team at the Hartington Unit. We are looking for an individual who is dedicated to the principles of social inclusion to work with adults experiencing mental health difficulties during an inpatient admission and support on discharge.

The Hub team offer a service for adults requiring acute inpatient stays at the Hartington Unit. Our services are a multi-disciplinary team, providing person-centred holistic care to patients with a wide variety of mental health conditions.

The role is focused on providing emotional support, drawing up on your own experiences of mental health or caring for those experiencing mental health difficulties. You will work with our team to provide practical and emotional support, allowing you to connect with people and enabling them to build self-confidence, a sense of personal wellbeing, build networks and engage with their family, friends, and communities.

If you have first-hand, personal experience of mental health difficulties and would like to help others with similar conditions, then this peer support worker role could be well suited to you. It could also be a good match for those wanting to get back into paid work, following a period of mental ill health.

You will join the team at the Hartington Unit before being part of the Making Room for Dignity Programme and moving with the team into the new Unit, Derwent Unit in February 2025.

Draw on lived experience of mental health to provide emotional and practical support to a group of service users to promote their recovery. This may include avoidance of admission and/or promoting recovery for inpatients by helping them to identify and build their own support network.
To support service users to engage effectively with care being offered and access appropriate services.
Draw upon lived experience and use active listening to inspire hope, offer empathy, empowerment, confidence building and validate a service user’s feelings.
To build relationships that are founded on the value of mutuality which will facilitate the provision of regular and practical support to service users in developing and managing independence and maintaining dignity and self-respect.
Articulate the peer support approach to the team and develop the role collaboratively to improve access and outcomes for service users.
To positively promote independent living of service users through role-modelling individual recovery journeys.
To have the individual service user’s needs always at the forefront of the PSW’s practice and to use the skills incorporated in the Peer Support Training to underpin their practice.
To build rapport with service users, whilst maintaining professional boundaries, drawing on both experience and knowledge of the service user perspective and an evidence-based approach.

Join 'Team Derbyshire Healthcare' and become part of a talented, compassionate and enthusiastic workforce committed to a vision of ‘making a positive difference in people's lives’.

CQC rated us as 'GOOD’ overall, commenting on how our colleagues “treated patients with compassion and kindness” and “felt positive and proud about working for the Trust.”

Benefits include:
Commitment to flexible working where this is possible
27 days annual leave/year plus bank holidays, increasing to 29 days after 5 years & 33 days after 10 years’ service
Yearly appraisal and commitment to ongoing training
Generous NHS pension scheme
Good maternity, paternity and adoption benefits
Health service discounts and online benefits
Incremental pay progression
Free confidential employee assistance programme 24/7
Access to our LGBT+ network, BAME Network and Christian Network
Health and wellbeing opportunities
Structured learning and development opportunities

Please review the Job Description and Person Specification, please click APPLY FOR THIS JOB - this link will take you to the TRAC Recruitment Site. You will need to register if you do not already have an account.

“As an employer and sponsor licence holder, to be able to provide sponsorship to overseas nationals via the Skilled Worker route we must ensure that we adhere to the sponsorship requirements set by UK Visas and Immigration. After carefully reviewing this role, we do not believe that this position meets the requirements for sponsorship. For details on eligibility criteria for a Skilled Worker visa, please follow this link to the gov.uk website Skilled Worker visa: Overview - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) ”

Peer Support Workers (PSW’s) are people who have their own lived experience of mental health challenges and may have accessed mental health services. They use empathy informed by their own experiences to support service users who are accessing mental health services to help them meet their treatment goals. Through sharing their own experience, the Peer Support Worker will inspire hope and belief that recovery is possible, helping service users to feel more positively about their future.

Your role as a Peer Support Worker will be an exciting role, working within a multi-disciplinary team. Initially the role will involve supporting to co-produce policy writing, procedures and governance, coupled with using your voice of lived experience of mental health, to ensure the team are aware of the imperative work you will be undertaking within the Unit upon it being opened. Promoting the implementation of cultural and structural change through the provision of peer support as an integral part of acute adult inpatient mental health services.

The Peer Support Worker will demonstrate best practice in relation to embedding recovery principles into practice. Peer Support Workers model the recovery principles together with personal responsibility, self-awareness and self-care whilst undertaking the duties of the role.

Upon the Unit being opened, you will support individual service users and lead or co-lead groups. The Peer Support Worker role sees the introduction of lived experience into everyday practice. Peer Support Workers offer a combination of group and one to one work and will work within the multi-disciplinary team to support a service user’s recovery journey. The post holder will facilitate formal and informal learning, working with staff in clinical practice and supporting the clinical team to develop the best recovery-based practice.

Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

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Peer Support Worker