Job overview

The Care Home Team work across Greenwich and Bexley to support care homes to provide a biopsychological approach to behavioural and psychological symptoms of Dementia (BPSD). The Mental Health Practitioner will work as part of a small multi-disciplinary team. As a member of the Care Home Team, you will be providing training and on-going support to nurses and carers in residential and nursing homes across Bexley and Greenwich. The training and support focuses’ upon BPSD and severe mental illness (SMI) and promotes person centred ways of understanding and delivering care. You will also manage referrals, complete specialist assessments and offer time limited inventions to individual clients to reduce levels BPSD, reduce the use of anti-psychotic medications and admissions to hospital. This will require you to provide case management to individual clients as well as offer specialist Mental Health Practitioner input as part of the MDT to other clients.

You will also need to have specialist knowledge of older adult mental health care and a good understanding of care homes. There will be an expectation of reporting and service evaluation throughout, this will require clear outcomes and recording of these in appropriate formats.

Main duties of the job

To provide specialist advice, assessment and evidence-based practice of service users with mental health problems in care homes, ensuring proactive management of service users’ needs.

To support and deliver a range of biopsychosocial therapeutic interventions to service users in care homes, who may not meet the criteria for secondary mental health services.

To provide specialist clinical advice, education and training, to care home on the suitability of interventions, and provide support implementing care plans and recommendations where appropriate.

To provide effective signposting to appropriate clinical services for ongoing support.

To provide high quality clinical expertise and clinical reasoning in relation to referrals that may require onward referrals for physical and mental health care.

Contribute to and carry out risk assessment and risk management plans.

To contribute to the continued development, review and transformation of the older adults’ mental health care and care home provision.

To be able to cope with occasional, potential stressful, upsetting or emotional situations in an empathetic manner, such as service users suffering from illnesses or emotional states that may lead to anxiety and aggressive behaviour.

To work in an environment where the work patterns may be disrupted by frequent demands from service users, clinical staff, students and administrative support staff and respond to any emergency situations arising.

Working for our organisation

Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.

We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.

Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families.  This is strengthened by our new values:

• We’re Kind
• We’re Fair
• We Listen
• We Care