Substance Misuse Outreach Occupational Therapist

An exciting opportunity has arisen to join a well-established drug and alcohol team operating in the community across the London Borough of Hillingdon. We are seeking an Occupational therapist to support a multidisciplinary team to help engage with the homeless population who struggle with substance use within the borough of Hillingdon. The team uses holistic assertive outreach techniques to support service users to access community-based drug and alcohol treatment and to secure long-term accommodation.,

• To undertake specialised assessment and provide interventions to adults in the community who present with complex and diverse problems developing negotiated goals and addressing impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions.
• To advise, instruct and teach patients, relatives, carers, and other professionals to promote understanding of the aims of therapy interventions and to empower patients and carers to self-manage the condition and optimise potential.
• To manage a delegated caseload and work as an autonomous practitioner in the assessment and treatment of patients within their place of residence and or ward, evaluating clinical practice and managing clinical time effectively by caseload prioritisation to meet service and patient needs and balancing other professional demands.
• To communicate information of a complex and sensitive nature and deal with highly stressful, emotional or hostile situations with empathy and professionalism.
• To organise group activities for service users that would empower service users to build on their independence skills by enabling them to access local services
• To use a trauma-informed approach in helping service users to overcome the stigma attached to mental and substance use by increasing their confidence in accessing meaningful activities, such as work or education.
  
  Come and join us and be one of the friendly and supportive 1500 Therapists / AHP's in CNWL. We work in many different teams in both physical and mental health, as well as a number of specialist areas. You could have a career for life with us and maintain your dual skills.
CNWL is very fortunate in having a long-established professional structure and this includes a Head of Therapies, an AHP associate director, Trust wide Professional Leads for all professional groups and borough and specialist professional leadership. This has the huge benefit of ensuring representation of our profession and therapies as a whole at all levels - both strategically and operationally. Personal and professional development is a high priority for the profession this enables us to invest in the development of our staff by providing excellent internal training as well as commissioning specialised external training and providing quality supervision. This ensures all our therapists / AHP's reach their full potential at every stage of their career. Our commitment to research, audit and evidence-based practice is made possible by our strong links with local universities and our CNWL AHP Research Network. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion are a priority for us in CNWL we expect staff to be culturally competent, reflective and open to culturally diverse CPD opportunities.