Peer Support Worker in Northampton

Do you have personal experience of living with mental distress or vulnerability and had contact with the Criminal Justice System? Do you want to use this experience to help others to health outcomes and engagement with services to assist recovery?

Northamptonshire Healthcare Foundation Trust are expanding their peer support service to include a post within the Criminal Justice Liaison and Diversion Team and RECONNECT team. Peer support is when people use their own lived experiences to support others who are having similar experiences. This is an exciting opportunity for someone with personal experience of living with mental distress or vulnerability as well as being involved with the criminal justice system themselves. This could be that you have been arrested or been to prison before. Using personal lived experience to support our service users has been evidenced as gold standard care.

We are recruiting to two positions within Liaison and Diversion and RECONNECT. For Liaison and Diversion, you will need to have personal experience of the criminal justice system. For RECONNECT, you will require personal experience of having been in a prison environment. The successful applicants will be required to work across both services, engaging with individuals offering support to set and reach recovery goals.

• Support service users directly including one-one or in small groups.
• Support service users with their integration into the community.
• Initiate, establish and maintain relationships with service users in a variety of settings (including, homes, NHFT sites and in the community).
• Share and discuss common experiences with service users in an appropriate manner.
• Work under the direction and leadership of registered professionals, undertaking duties using a recovery focus.
• Support people with their emotional, personal, and physical needs.
• Develop a trusting and mutually beneficial rapport with service users.
• Act as a coach and mentor to service users by providing information about support and services available to them within NHFT and the local community.
• Develop links across other organisations that support service users.

Please note, applicants who do not indicate that they have lived experience of mental health challenges or vulnerabilities plus experience of being within a custodial setting within application will not be considered for the role. Please note we are unable to accept applications for those on the adult or child barred lists. This role will involve a DBS application prior to unconditional offer of employment. These will be considered on an individual basis.

About us: NHFT is an integrated primary care and mental health Trust, providing physical, mental health and specialty services in both hospital settings and out in the community. Because we put the person at the centre of all we do, we focus on delivering care that is as easy to access as possible. This means many of our services can be provided at home, work or in schools. We also provide health services to various prisons and detention centres in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. NHFT promotes a culture of learning to improve the care and safety of our patients and staff, which focuses on people who enable our Trust to be 'outstanding' by supporting opportunity, innovation, development and growth.

For further information on the advertised role, please refer to the job description located under the Supporting Documents heading. The full person specification can be accessed under the About You Section of the document.

• Details personal experience of the criminal justice system.
• Details personal experience of prison (if applicable).
• Willingness to use own experiences to support others.
• Previous experience of working with vulnerable people.
• Previous experience of working with communities.
• Able to fulfil the requirement to commute across the whole of Northamptonshire.

• Willingness to undertake peer support worker qualification.
• Holds peer support worker qualification.

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.