Assistant Practitoner

An exciting opportunity has arisen to appoint a skilled and enthusiastic Assistant Practitioner within the Acton MINT team in the borough of Ealing.

We are seeking to recruit individuals with a good understanding of mental illness as well as excellent communication, personal, and customer service skills, who have a passion for wanting to empower and support individuals with their 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 service users

The community mental health framework for adults and older adults (2019) set out a vision for providing services in local settings that better reflected the needs of the local population. West London NHS Trust is one of a small number of pilot sites and has developed an exciting new Mental Health Integrated Network Teams (MINT) service that offers service users more needs based, episodic interventions integrated with primary care. Link Work will be a key specialism within MINT, overseeing recovery focused interventions that make use of community assets as well as those of the multi-disciplinary team.

You will play a vital role in connecting people who are experiencing a challenge with their mental health with community supports and resources. As an Assistant Practitioner 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.

This is a key role in promoting and improving health, wellbeing, and care outcomes for our clients.

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.