Senior Specialist Community Children Occupational Therapist

An exciting opportunity and innovative opportunity has arisen within our Community Children's Occupational Therapy team. We are looking for an experienced occupational therapist to join London Evelina Community Children Occupational Therapy services to provide assessment and intervention to children with neurodevelopmental disorders and provide assessment for Special Education Needs and Disabilities. The postholder will work across both of our sites: Sunshine House Child Development centre and Mary Sheridan Children and Young people centres.

The successful applicant will working be within a large team of Evelina Community Occupational Therapists that support services to the Evelina community population in Southwark and Lambeth and will be an integral part of the multidisciplinary team and Local Authority SEND partnership. The multidisciplinary team includes Paediatricians, Speech and Language Therapists, Physiotherapists, dieticians, complex needs nursing team and an office administration service. The Occupational Therapy service provides services to children presenting with developmental difficulties from birth to 19 years.

The successful candidate will have the opportunity to provide highly specialist advice, assessment and intervention to support the integration and inclusion of children at home, school and in the community.

Interviews will take place on Thursday 27th November 2025

The post holder will have the opportunity to work alongside the Occupational Therapy leadership team and support service development and quality improvement and participate in transformation work within their roles.

You will have the opportunity to provide various models of care ranging from direct intervention including groups, parent intervention and advice & consultation. The post holder will be professionally supported through supervision and given the opportunity to further develop and build on their specialist clinical skills and knowledge with the support of Evelina Healthcare Community Children's Occupational Therapy Services.

As well as supervise band 6 Occupational Therapists, the post will provide you with the following opportunities:

To both lead and participate in service training

To conduct audits

To lead on care pathways, service developments and participate in service transformation work to improve OT pathways

You will working within a large team of Occupational Therapists that truly believe in putting children and their families at the centre of what we do.

You will be supporting babies, children, young people (0-19 years), with a wide range of health, physical, learning or development difficulties and/or disabilities. We aim to enable a child's participation within their own environment, and as such your work will be across home and education settings, as well as in our child development centres.

You will be an integral part of the multidisciplinary team, including Paediatricians, Speech and Language Therapists, Physiotherapists, Dietitians, School Nurses, Health Visitors, and the administrators which support the team.

Please see the attached Job Description for full details of duties and responsibilities.

To carry out advanced Occupational Therapy assessments and treatments of children referred to the service who have a range of special needs particularly children with complex neurodevelopmental disorders. This will include completing Education and Health Needs assessments on behalf of Special Education Needs and Disabilities Team (SEND)

To provide advice and consultation to SEND in panel meetings

To manage a highly specialist caseload independently

To use advanced clinical reasoning skills to analyse and interpret complex assessment findings, from both standardised and non-standardised assessments in order to help contribute and formulate uni-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary outcomes.

To identify and select from a wide variety of therapeutic interventions which is evidence based using a client centred approach considering any clinical risk.

To teach and demonstrate specific therapeutic techniques to parents/carers and education staff to enable them to carry out an Occupational Therapy programme designed specifically for their child.

Evaluate client intervention and progress using appropriate outcome measures and evaluation tools. Modify treatment programmes as appropriate and discharge clients when the need for Occupational Therapy is no longer indicated.

To provide the Occupational Therapy services to children in schools. This will involve the management, co-ordination and delivery of therapy on site, supervising more junior occupational therapy staff. The therapist will liaise directly with the Head Teacher and staff on issues such as setting of priorities and teacher training.