Job overview

Are you a brilliant advocate? Do you want to help prevent early death and reduce health inequalities in people experiencing homelessness? Do you like solving difficult problems, and changing hearts and minds. Are you a jack of all trades? If so, then this job is for you. 

Our teams work with people experiencing homelessness when they visit A&E or are admitted to hospital. We work to ensure these patients get all the acute medical treatment that they need whilst they are at or within the hospital. We also work to ensure that patients are discharged safely and effectively in a way that stops the revolving door, and improves patient’s long-term health outcomes. This includes working to ensure that homeless patient’s support needs in the community are met post discharge, for example connecting with primary care, mental health services and addictions support, medication concordance support, screening, vaccination and health promotion opportunities. 

Main duties of the job

We are looking for a motivated individual, with a strong understanding homelessness safeguarding, and who understands the complexities of undertaking mental capacity assessments in inclusion health groups. A positive, can do ‘attitude’, a commitment to changing care for this extremely vulnerable patient group, and a desire to communicate with a wide variety of partners and stakeholders is essential.

The main duties of the role will be assisting in the service aims. These are as follows:

Effectively engage the patient in all relevant services / support,
Maximise the benefit of the attendance / admission for the patient from a health and social care perspective,
Link the patient into all necessary health and social care and support pending discharge,
Advocate for the patient to receive assessment, treatment or services when this is required
Safeguard patients effectively
Ensure a safe and effective discharge to accommodation (where this is possible)
Stop the revolving door

Working for our organisation

With nearly 9,000 dedicated staff caring for patients around the clock, St George's Hospital is the largest healthcare provider in southwest London.

The main site, St George’s Hospital in Tooting – one of the country’s principal teaching hospitals – is shared with St George’s, University of London, which trains medical students and carries out advanced medical research. St George’s Hospital also hosts the St George’s, University of London and Kingston University Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences, which is responsible for training a wide range of healthcare professionals from across the region.

As well as acute hospital services, St Georges Hospital provides a wide variety of specialist care and a full range of community services to patients of all ages following integration with Community Services Wandsworth in 2010.

St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust serves a population of 1.3 million across south west London. A large number of services, such as cardiothoracic medicine and surgery, neurosciences and renal transplantation, also cover significant populations from Surrey and Sussex, totalling around 3.5 million people.

The trust also provides care for patients from a larger catchment area in southeast England, for specialties such as complex pelvic trauma. Other services treat patients from all over the country, such as family HIV care and bone marrow transplantation for non-cancer diseases.