Community Mental Health Link Worker London, England
Job description
An exciting opportunity has arisen for skilled and enthusiastic Community Mental Health Link Worker within the North MINT team in Hammersmith & Fulham.
We are seeking to recruit a passionate and experienced individual with a good understanding of mental illness and young people (16 to 25), as well as excellent communication, personal, and customer service skills, who have a desire to empower and support young individuals with their connections to their local community and their overall recovery journey. We are looking for highly motivated, enthusiastic, and caring individuals who can provide the best possible care with patience and compassion to our clients.
The Link Worker role is aimed at actively supporting an individual to choose and engage with opportunities of meaningful activity, as part of improving their mental health and wellbeing.
Link Workers do this through developing collaborative, short term goals, and offering practical skills and support to connect an individual to services and facilities in their local community.
You will play a vital role in connecting people who are experiencing a challenge with their mental health with community supports and resources. As a Link Worker you will specialise in signposting to and supporting with referrals to identified appropriate community resources, fostering autonomy and promoting independence, building on the individual’s strengths and aiding in gaining skills and confidence in collaboratively identified areas of support, as well as escalating concerns should they arise.
You will be comfortable working both on your own and with others from a range of different backgrounds. You’ll need to be resilient, motivated, and committed to adapt to working in an ever-changing environment.
West London NHS Trust is one of the most diverse providers of mental health, community and social care in the UK.
Our 3,982 staff care for people in hospital and in the community, helping them to recover and go on to lead full and productive lives. We aim to be the best organisation of our kind in the country.
We provide care and treatment for more than 800,000 people living in the London boroughs of Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow, delivering services in the community (at home, in GP surgeries and care homes), hospital, specialist clinics and forensic (secure) units.
We’re rated good overall by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Together, we’re committed to promoting hope and wellbeing, working with patients, service users, carers, families and partners across the communities we serve.
We are keen to ensure that our workforce reflects the community it serves, particularly in terms of ethnicity, gender, disability, LGBTQ+ and experience of mental illness.
The role involves providing support to clients referred by GPs to the Mental Health Integrated Network Team (MINT), to access locally-based community services, to aid their mental health recovery and encourage meaningful engagement within their local community.
The role also involves carrying out brief assessments with prospective clients who have been identified as requiring support from our service, signposting to agreed and appropriate community resources, making additional referrals, escalating any identified safety or safeguarding concerns appropriately, and feeding back as necessary to the wider team.
A key part of the role is to develop a live register of assets in the community that could be useful to people on the caseload who would benefit and to work with other post- holders on a system-wide asset-based register, as well as fostering strong relationships and keeping the lines of communication open with our community partners.
