Peer Supporter

Do you have a lived experience of Traumatic Brain Injury? Do you have personal experience of trying to make sense of the changes experienced after a head injury, of going through rehab and adjusting to a new sense of self? If so, Northumberland Head Injuries Service (NHIS) wants to hear from you. The role is for a part time Peer Supporter to work in the community with people with traumatic brain injury. This is a unique opportunity to join Northumberland Head Injuries Service as part of the clinical team, utilising your personal experience or traumatic brain injury to:

• Find a mutual connection with service users and their families by sharing your rehab story and lived experience
• Engage in 1:1 work with service users and some group work to develop confidence, supporting service users throughout their rehabilitation journey and working as part of a multi-disciplinary team.
• Help develop a bank of former and existing service users to ensure we have full and meaningful service user involvement and consultation in all our service developments.
• Record progress and concerns, working in a manner which ensures confidentiality and security.
Main duties of the job The post holder will be expected to confidently discuss their own brain injury rehab journey with service users. The post holder will need to possess excellent listening skills, demonstrating an ability to listen sensitively without judgement. The post holder must be able to meet the mobility requirements of the job in order to visit and support service users across the county. The service has access to pool cars for staff. The Peer Supporter's responsibilities will include:
• Sharing their own experiences of brain injury
• Helping the individual and their family to understand their condition
• Sharing ideas to promote wellbeing
• Working within the ethos of giving hope to service users and their families, and supporting them to engage with NHIS, especially those hard to reach individuals
• Support and encourage service users to access and engage in the rehabilitation process, for example, where necessary helping them to attend appointments
• To promote the ongoing development of service user involvement at NHIS
• Encourage service user recruitment into the neuro rehabilitation service user involvement bank.
• To contribute to ongoing NHIS projects for example planning service user and family educational study days, Quality Improvement projects.
• Be involved with NHIS operational processes, eg. Staff recruitment
• To be involved with the wider Peer Support Worker Network within CNTW
  
  As an employee of CNTW, the wellbeing of all of our staff is vitally important. The post holder will have several avenues of support to help them develop confidence in their own personal skills and abilities.
The team is a well established service which has been serving the Northumberland community for over 30 years. The team has an excellent reputation both locally and nationally with staff frequently asked to present at conferences or contribute to the development of neuro services in other parts of the country. This post is another example of the service showing willingness to take involvement to a new level by recruiting someone with lived experience into the team. The team has even made links with Northumbria university to research and evaluate the impact of the peer supporter role