Clinical Practitioner in North East

County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust

Clinical Practitioner

The closing date is 25 October 2026

Help shape the Future of Child Protection and Family Support in County Durham

Are you an experienced health professional with a passion for early intervention, safeguarding and making a difference for children and families?

This exciting 12-month secondment offers a unique opportunity to join County Durham's Families First Partnership Front Door team. Working at the heart of a multiagency safeguarding and support service, you will provide expert clinical insight, analyse complex health information, and influence critical decision making for children, young people, and families.

More than just a clinical role, you will help design, test, and develop the local model of multiagency working, ensuring health plays a central role in delivering the right support at the right time. This is a chance to lead change, strengthen existing partnerships across health and social care, and help shape the future of children's services across County Durham.

Ideal for professionals who are:

• Passionate about improving outcomes for children.
• Confident working across organisational boundaries.
• Skilled at analysing complex information and influencing decisions.
• Excited by innovation, service development, and transformational change.

Be part of something that helps create a more connected approach to supporting families.

Main duties of the job

Families First Partnership represents a significant changein how children, young people and families receive help and support, with astronger emphasis on earlier intervention, multiagency working, family-focusedpractice and getting the right help in place at the right time.

The developing health model aims to ensure that relevanthealth information and clinical expertise contribute effectively to multiagencyunderstanding and decision-making, while improving coordination across healthservices and the follow through of health actions and outcomes.

This is not simply an opportunity to work within anestablished service. The successful applicants will be part of the teamdesigning and testing the health contribution while delivering it, with anopportunity to influence how health works within the Front Door and acrossorganisational boundaries.

About us

If you are being interviewed you must accept an interview slot in the system to continue, even if you have arranged with the manager.

You must be able to produce ALL certificates stated essential in the person specification or you will not be able to complete pre-employment checks.

We provide hospital services from two acute sites - Darlington Memorial Hospital and University Hospital of North Durham. We have a centre for planned care in Bishop Auckland and provide care from community hospitals in Chester-le-Street, Shotley Bridge, Barnard Castle, Sedgefield and Weardale as well as over 80 other community based settings and providing care in patients' homes.

We particularly welcome applications from disabled and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates as BAME and disabled people are currently under-represented.

Full Job Descriptions can be found in the adverts supporting documents.

Over reliance onAI-generated content is discouraged and may diminish the applicant's chances ofsuccess.

For the most up-to-date information on visa requirements and eligibility, please check online to determine whether you can apply.

Please note that we may close any vacancy early once a sufficient number of applications have been received.

Job responsibilities

The role

Working as part of the developing multiagency Front Door, the Clinical Practitioners will provide senior clinical expertise to support decision making for children, young people and families.

The role will involve working across organisational boundaries to draw together relevant information from multiple health providers and use professional judgement to interpret its significance, identify patterns and cumulative concerns, and translate this into a clear clinical contribution to multiagency decision making.

The Clinical Practitioners will identify unmet or emerging health needs, risk and protective factors and relevant family context, ensuring that health information is not simply collated but understood in relation to the child and family and the decisions being made.

Alongside this operational role, the postholders will help develop, test and evaluate the processes, relationships and infrastructure required to establish a sustainable, proportionate and effective health contribution to the Front Door.

There is an initial expectation for staff to work at the nominated or linked satellite base in the locality with hybrid working evolving as the front door model develops.

The postholder will remain employed by, and accountable to, their substantive employer throughout the period of secondment. All existing terms and conditions of employment, employment benefits, professional accountability, line management and supervision arrangements will remain unchanged for the purposes of maintaining professional registration and employment status. While undertaking day-to-day responsibilities within the Front Door, the postholder will receive operational support and supervision from the Durham County Council FFP Health Lead or the Designated Nurse for Safeguarding Children (ICB), together with designated members of the FFP Health Alliance, in accordance with the agreed FFP governance arrangements.

Throughout the secondment, the postholder must comply with the policies and procedures of their employing organisation, the Durham Safeguarding Children Partnership and Durham County Council, and will be expected to familiarise themselves with the relevant policies and procedures of all organisations involved.

In the event of any conflict or inconsistency between clinical policies, procedures or guidance, the policies and procedures of the employing organisation shall take precedence unless otherwise required by law, professional regulation or statutory safeguarding responsibilities.

Key responsibilities

The postholders will:

• Provide senior clinical input and health expertise within the Families First Partnership Front Door.
• Review Requests for Support and identify where health information, clinical advice or health action may contribute to understanding a child or familys needs.
• Determine proportionate health information requirements and support appropriate requests to relevant health services and Single Points of Contact (SPoCs) for children and adult services, establishing new networks as required.
• Analyse multi-source health information, identifying significant health needs, patterns, cumulative risk, protective factors and relevant family context.
• Develop clear and proportionate Integrated Health Summary Reports to support multiagency understanding and decision-making.
• Provide clinical opinion, recommendations and constructive professional challenge where appropriate.
• Participate in multiagency Front Door discussions as an equal partner in decisions about support, safeguarding and next steps, which may include progression to a strategy discussion.
• Support timely coordination, recording and follow-through of health actions and outcomes arising from Front Door discussions.
• Liaise across Primary Care, 025 services, acute and community services, mental health services (adult/parental services and CAMHS), NEAS and other relevant health providers.
• Promote child and family-centred practice, including consideration of communication needs, disability, neurodiversity and reasonable adjustments.
• Work within relevant safeguarding, information-sharing, confidentiality and professional governance requirements.
• Contribute to the development and testing of consistent Front Door health processes, including SPoC arrangements, operating procedures and interfaces with wider health and multiagency pathways.
• Identify duplication, delays, gaps and unintended consequences and actively contribute to improving emerging processes.
• Contribute to quality assurance, multiagency reflective practice, learning and evaluation.
• Contribute to the identification of knowledge gaps, development and delivery of training relating to health for the front door multiagency team.
• Contribute to the development of population level understanding and intelligence that can be fed back to relevant organisations to improve service delivery and development.
• Support the development of measures to assess the impact and value of health involvement, including timeliness, quality, workload, practitioner and family experience and outcomes.
• Contribute to recommendations about the future health operating model and its potential scalability across County Durham.
• Work closely with the FFP Health Lead, Business Support colleagues, other MACPT professionals and the wider Health Alliance.
• Support implementation and ongoing development of the FFP reforms as the programme moves towards go-live.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for two experienced registered health professionals with strong safeguarding knowledge who are confident working autonomously with complex information and across traditional organisational boundaries.

These are operational and developmental roles. The postholders will need to work flexibly during the Test & Learn period, recognising that processes, systems and responsibilities will evolve as learning emerges. Curiosity, professional confidence, adaptability and the ability to reflect on what is and is not working will therefore be important.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• See attached document

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Employer name

County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust

£49,387 to £56,515 a yearper annum pro rata

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