Occupational Therapist - Medical/Vascular/Surgery

This post holder will be an autonomous practitioner, taking a lead in coordinating and providing a highly specialist occupational therapy service to patients within the medical/surgical team. They will provide assessment and treatment for patients with a wide range of complex physical, sensory, perceptual and cognitive problems within inpatient and community settings. The post holder will manage their own caseload, working alongside the multi-disciplinary team and other external agencies to ensure highly specialist treatment plans.

They will work collaboratively with patients, carers, and colleagues in health and social services to ensure effective service planning, policy, and delivery of services to their specific patient group. The post holder will be the joint lead therapist for this area of service and represent the department at relevant meetings both in and outside the Trust. They will contribute to departmental meetings, lead complex audits, and regularly undertake research activities in their specialist area. They will be responsible for planning and delivering highly specialist training to other OTs, professionals, and patients/carers on all aspects of sensory, perceptual, physical, and functional skills.

Responsibilities

• Work with patients, family, and MDT staff to identify goals as part of the overall care plan.
• Liaise with the multidisciplinary team, which includes dieticians, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, ward nursing staff, social workers, doctors, community OT/PT/SLT, and outreach teams.
• Attend reviews and case conferences, communicating relevant observations and information as a member of the team.
• Demonstrate effective written and verbal communication skills with patients and carers, team members, OT colleagues, and other external agencies (e.g. Social Services, equipment stores, wheelchair service).
• Use sound judgement, reasoning, communication, and negotiation skills to establish a therapeutic relationship in complex and sensitive cases, managing barriers to communication.
• Communicate complex and sensitive information relating to medical conditions and the OT process, requiring skills of training, empathy, reassurance, negotiation, and motivation (e.g. patients with terminal illness, limited rehab potential).
• Liaise and establish effective and efficient communication networks with patients, carers, and other health workers and internal/external agencies throughout the various departments within the hospital and local community.
• Promote awareness of the OT role within the MDT, negotiating priorities as appropriate.

About LNWH: London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust (LNWH) cares for the people of Brent, Ealing, Harrow, and beyond. Our team of more than 8,200 clinical and support staff serve a diverse population of almost one million people.

We run major acute services at Northwick Park Hospital, St Marks Hospital, Ealing Hospital, and Central Middlesex Hospital. We are a university teaching NHS trust, in recognition of the important role we play in training clinicians of the future and bringing the benefits of research to the public.