Job overview

Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust are committed to safeguarding children, young people and adults. We concentrate on improving people’s lives while protecting their right to live in safety, free from bullying, harassment, abuse, discrimination, avoidable harm and neglect. We make sure we share concerns quickly and appropriately.

The post-holder will have a significant role in promoting safeguarding within our settings,  including a think family approach, early help and prevention, whilst advocating for the voice and experience of children who's welfare is paramount,  and listening to adults to ensure our response is person centred and safe.

The post holder will be supporting and responding to a range of safeguarding enquiries from the whole work force including children and adult directorates, community & acute services, forensic and specialist, and all support services including volunteers within the trust.

We are serious about diversity and inclusion, and we are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, and we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles, like this one.

Main duties of the job

The post-holders will have a strong advisory and signposting function, and will follow the systems and processes in place to effectively and expediently manage concern, referrals and individual cases.

The post holder will be required to liaise with operational services to reduce risk and concerns around safeguarding.  Complete fact finding, such as via Independent Management Reports for Child Rapid Reviews, Safeguarding Adult Reviews and Domestic Homicide Review etc with robust analysis.  Advise on the management, waiting list and discharge plans for complex safeguarding cases to prevent omission, manage risk and support multi agency collaboration.  Attend child and adult practice reviews and learning events, enabling learning to be taken forward in practice. Follow up on referral pathways, including case escalation in support of teams and practitioners.

The post-holders will deliver a significant amount of safeguarding training from a variety of safeguarding topics in a variety of formats, i.e. face to face, teams, planned, large sessions and bitesize to meet the needs of the work force.

The post holder will provide reflective safeguarding supervision and debrief, to optimise staff support and practice development.

Working for our organisation

We are the Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust. We care for the mental health and wellbeing of people across Kent and Medway. Our teams support adults with a wide range of mental health needs. Because we cover the whole county and both hospital and community settings, we can make care more joined up and easier to access for the 1.8 million people of Kent and Medway. Rated ‘Good’ by the CQC, we care for over 2,000 people in our hospitals and 54,000 in the community each year.

Our vision is simple: We are here to help communities not just live with mental illness, but live well. It’s why we’re passionate about working with communities to make mental health care better for everyone. And everything we do is guided by our values caring, inclusive, curious and confident.

Join us - if you share our passion for better mental health care and want to be part of a team that’s doing well together.