Mental Health Well-being Practitioner (MHWP)

We have an exciting and rare opportunity for two Mental Health Well-being Practitioners (MHWPs) to join our older adult community mental health teams (CMHTs). The CMHTs have a key role in promoting metal wellbeing and engaging service users and carers to meet their mental health needs, avoiding the need for more restrictive treatment options such as inpatient care.

MHWP roles were introduced to the older adult CMHTs in 2022 to increase access to psychological interventions and since then have had a significant impact on ensuring patients receive a psychological intervention tailored to their needs and reducing waiting times for therapy.

The CMHTs are well regarded by service users and carers with respondents on recent patient and carer experience questionnaires consistently rating their experience of the service positively. The teams reflect the diversity of the local community and team members are passionate in their desire to support each other to provide high quality patient care. As an MHWP you will have opportunities to work both independently and as a core part of a team and the flexibility to structure your time according to the needs of your caseload., As an MHWP in the older adult CMHTs, you will be part of a psychology and psychotherapy workforce, delivering specified wellbeing-focused psychologically-informed interventions in line with best available evidence, under close supervision from a clinical psychologist or CBT therapist. You will also have the opportunity to work with people with behaviours that challenge in the context of a dementia diagnosis.

You will also work alongside the range of professionals in the multi-disciplinary team (including nurses, OTs, social workers, support workers, psychologists / psychological therapists, psychiatrists and administrators) and contribute to the MDT by care coordinating\key-working and contributing to information gathering, risk assessment and care planning. We are in the process of transitioning to Dialog+ as a tool for co-produced care planning and use of this will be key to your role in collaborating to develop care plans that are focused on strengths and are outcome based.

We are looking for someone who can engage sensitively and empathically with service users and carers and who is able to value each of their service users as an individual. The role will involve regular working from the team base and seeing service users both in clinic and in their own homes across the relevant borough.

We have two full-time posts available, one based in our Croydon team, (located at Heavers Resource Centre, 122 Selhurst Road, SE25 6LL), and the other based in the Lewisham team (located at 91 Granville Park, SE13 7DW). Both teams have good public transport links, with national rail stations (Selhurst / Norwood Junction for the Croydon team, Lewisham for the Lewisham team) and bus routes located within walking distance. Ability to drive is therefore not essential to this role.