Job summary
- Main area
- Wheelchair Services
- Grade
- NHS AfC: Band 5
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time
- Flexible working
- Job ref
- 319-7511169IO
- Employer
- Northumbria Healthcare - NHCT Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Northumbria Healthcare Manufacturing & Innovation Hub
- Town
- Seaton Deleval
- Salary
- £31,049 - £37,796 per annum
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 30/10/2025 23:59
Employer heading

Wheelchair Therapist
NHS AfC: Band 5
Do you want to work in one of the best performing NHS organisations in England? Work for an organisation that was voted the best acute and combined acute and community trust in the country, based on the experience of its staff (NHS Staff Survey 2022). Work in an organisation that supports its staff and focuses on staff experience as much as it does the experience of its patients? You can live and breathe in an area that has the cleanest air, cost effective living, great nightlife, some of the best schools with a wealth of history available on your doorstep. Sound too good to be true? Well it isn’t, this is what you get when you work for Northumbria Healthcare and, this is…the Northumbria Way!
What the Northumbria Way means for you:
- Extensive staff health and well-being programme including access to our specialist Wellbeing Hub
- Support and connection through a variety of Staff Network groups
- A range of flexible working opportunities
- Generous annual leave and pension scheme
- Access to lease car and home electronics scheme (qualifying criteria applies)
- Opportunities to improve your professional development through our vast training programmes
- Access to savings scheme via salary sacrifice with Northumberland Community Bank
We work closely with Kids First Nurseries that are based within our trust grounds at Wansbeck, North Tyneside and Hexham hospitals to care for our Trust family's children, they offer care for children from 6 weeks old up to 4 years. There are a number of funding options run by the government to help working parents, including Early Years Funding and Tax Free Childcare.
Flexible working offers choice in where, when, and how we work, ensuring patients remain at the heart of all we do. It’s open to everyone, and we aim to find solutions that work for both you and the organisation. All arrangements must be reasonable and balanced to maintain safe and effective patient care.
We are proud to be one of the country’s top performing NHS trusts – rated ‘outstanding’ overall by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). We provide a range of health and care services to support more than 500,000 people living in Northumberland and North Tyneside across the largest geographical area of any NHS Trust in England. Our teams deliver care from hospitals, a range of community venues and people’s homes. Our hospitals include a specialist emergency care hospital (the first of its kind in England), three general hospitals and community hospitals. In the community we deliver a wide range of community and public health services.
We lead in innovation and quality, having opened the Northumbria Healthcare Manufacturing and Innovation Hub during the Covid-19 pandemic and have recently launched our Community Promise – a pledge to make a real impact not just in healthcare but on the wider factors that affect people’s lives, such as education, employment and the economy.
If Northumbria Healthcare sounds like somewhere you could belong we would love to hear from you. Visit our website to catch up on our latest news.
Whilst Northumbria Healthcare are a highly innovative organisation, the use of Third Party Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a risk to the integrity of our Recruitment & Selection processes. If you use AI, and it poses a risk to the integrity your individual recruitment process, we may withdraw your application at any stage of the process.
Job overview
Northumbria Wheelchair Services is embarking on a new change and we are looking to recruit to our growing team. This is an exciting time for us as we have introduced a new structure within the service and are also recruiting a new clinical lead. Delivering care to residents across the Northumberland and North Tyneside area our service is located in recently purpose-built accommodation with excellent staff and patient facilities on the Northumbria manufacturing hub site in Seaton Delaval, Whitley Bay. If you are a therapist looking for a new challenge and would like the opportunity to be part of this forward thinking team then this may be for you.
We currently have a full time vacancy for a band 5 Occupational therapist/Physiotherapist to work as a Wheelchair therapist.
Main duties of the job
To manage your own caseload of clients who often present with complex needs, using advanced clinical reasoning to assess, prescribe, implement and evaluate the equipment provided.
As a band 5, you will be expected to carry out full assessments of the clients' wheelchair and postural needs, analysing their situation and the effect their illness or disability has on their lives.
You will be able to identify and select the most appropriate wheelchair service intervention options - balancing the complex needs of the suitability of equipment, client choice, risk, safety, independence, areas of conflict, eligibility, and cost effectiveness - making informed decisions with all concerned.
We welcome applicants who would be happy to be trained in wheelchair provision. Full training will be provided.
Working for our organisation
We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, in addition to our state-of-the-art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, the first of its kind in England. We also care for people in their homes and provide services from facilities in local communities such as health centres. We give people greater choice and control over their care to help them to live independently at home and avoid hospital admission where appropriate. High quality patient care is at the heart of everything we do and we strive to ensure every single patient and service user has an exceptional experience with us. We have one of the most extensive patient experience programmes of any trust in England.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
To analyse the results of each wheelchair assessment, consider a range of options, formulate professional judgements and organise provision of equipment.
To monitor, evaluate and modify interventions for clients in order to measure progress and ensure effectiveness of the interventions.
Act appropriately in relation to clinical adverse incidents taking remedial action by alerting necessary professionals, complying with guidelines implemented by the Trust and Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
Manage a caseload of clients including adults and children.
Undertake clinical wheelchair and seating assessments at clinic, within the clients home, residential or health care setting. This is to include assessments for:
- Manual wheelchairs
- Specially adapted manual wheelchairs.
- Powered wheelchairs, including initial assessment only with regards to
- Suitability and criteria for provision of indoor/outdoor powered wheelchairs.
- Postural support and special seating.
- Pressure relieving cushions.
- Refer to senior staff for more detailed assessments.
To analyse the results of the above assessments, consider a range of options, formulate professional judgements and organise provision of equipment.
Set up, hand over and demonstrate equipment with a high degree of accuracy taking into account moving and handling regulations.
To monitor, evaluate and modify interventions for clients in order to measure progress and ensure effectiveness of the interventions.
Person specification
Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Degree in Occupational Therapy or Physiotherapy.
- Commitment to become re registered with Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC)
Applicant requirements
You must have appropriate UK professional registration.
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Mark Buckley
- Job title
- Operational Service Manager
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Telephone number
- 07754048976
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