Peer Support Worker - Specialist Perinatal CMHT

The SPCMHT aspires to provide an excellent comprehensive Perinatal Mental Health Service for the women of Lancashire and South Cumbria. We deliver a sustainable and resilient solution for women suffering from a mental illness in the perinatal period by focusing on improving outcomes for them, their infant, partners and their families.

Do you have experience of using mental health services? Would you like to use this experience to help others? An exciting opportunity has arisen to work in this exciting service.

The role of peer worker has been developed specifically for people who have lived experience of mental health challenges and recovery. Through sharing wisdom from their own experiences, peer workers will inspire hope and belief that recovery is possible. Peer workers provide invaluable support to service users navigating mental health systems. It is beneficial for applicants to have completed their own personal recovery plan such as the Health and Wellbeing Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) and/or advanced statement.

We would welcome applications from both male and female applicants and although it would be an advantage there is no requirement to have previous perinatal experience, a fully budgeted training package is available as part of your induction and planned within your Personal Development Review.

Main duties of the job

To work as a member of a multi-disciplinary specialist perinatal community mental health team offering a comprehensive perinatal mental health service, to partners of service users experiencing mental health difficulties and their families in the perinatal period.

To participate in the development and maintenance of a quality region wide perinatal service through effective collaboration, liaison and prioritisation with statutory and non-statutory organisations.

Contribution to the building up of local care networks for mothers and their family.

To work as a peer support worker in partnership with service users and other professionals' within the Dialog+ framework.

The role of the Peer Support worker is to help individuals identify their own achievable and meaningful recovery goals and set recovery objectives, drawing on your mutual resources as peers and utilising a range of recovery tools, techniques and experience. To model personal responsibility, self-awareness, self-belief, self-advocacy and hopefulness via the telling of own recovery story to inspire and instil confidence in peers.

The post holder will be responsible for providing short-term support to vulnerable individuals. The post holder will be responsible for working closely with the service user and family to prioritise need and plan actions to address the identified needs.

Lancashire & South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust provides a range of services including secondary mental health care across this area. Specialist provision comprises inpatient child and adolescent mental health services, perinatal mental health and forensic services including low and medium secure care.

The Trust also provides a range of physical health and well-being services in the community alongside a range of partners in the Lancashire, Cumbria and Sefton area.

Lancashire & South Cumbria Foundation Trust encourages flexible working, we believe that a positive work/life balance benefits NHS employees through improved health and wellbeing. We would consider working patterns such as; term time, part time, compressed hours, flexi-time and career breaks. We encourage applicants to state clearly on their application forms this request and discuss these options at interview.