Referral Officer

**About us**:
**Want to help people find the right type of support for them? Got skills or experience in social care? Fancy helping transform people’s lives for the better?**

We’re social care charity PSS and we’re looking for a big-hearted, determined, professional, open-minded and genuine care professional to come and join us as our new referral driver in Lincolnshire.

We’ve got an amazing service in Lincolnshire called Shared Lives - and we want to make sure that social care professionals who refer into our service, and people who it could support, know what we do, how our support works and how easy it is to make a referral.

As our referral driver, your mission will be to increase the number of appropriate referrals being made to our Shared Lives service, spread the word about how ace Shared Lives is amongst fellow social care professionals and local families, and help us reach our growth targets.

**So, what is Shared Lives?**

Shared Lives is a little bit like fostering, but it’s for adults who need some support to live as independently as possible. With Shared Lives, someone who needs support moves in with one of our Shared Lives carers, who are trained and recruited by us at PSS. Together, they do what it says on the tin: share their lives. Just like a family. The person who needs support gets professional care from the carer in a warm, comfortable home, and the carer gets to work from their own house, fit work around their family and make the most incredible impact on someone’s life. It’s one of the safest, fastest-growing forms of care and at PSS we’re so proud to have invented it back in 1978.

**What does it involve?**

As our referral driver, on an average week you’ll be:

- building brilliant working relationships with people who might make referrals to our Shared Lives service, like commissioners, local authority teams and anyone else who might want to refer into our service;
- sharing the amazing ways PSS Shared Lives can benefit people who need support, helping potential referrers to figure out whether Shared Lives could be a good choice for the person they support;
- matching people who need support with our amazing Shared Lives carers based on their wants and needs;
- working on financial agreements;
- putting support plans together;
- doing risk assessments;
- building our reputation as a fantastic social care provider;
- managing the referral process from enquiry through to the arrangement starting, working closely with everyone involved to make sure everything runs smoothly.

**To be ace at this job, you’ll need to**:

- have a qualification in education, health or social care or be willing to work towards one;
- know all about person-centred care and support planning, and to share our belief that things should be done with people, not to them;
- be able to build strong working relationships with everyone you work with;
- have a knack with tech and be able to use all the Microsoft Office essentials, like Word, Teams, Outlook, Powerpoint, etc;
- be able to spot a risk a mile off, and know how to do a brill risk assessment;
- be up-to-speed on safeguarding and how important it is;
- have fab communication and customer service skills;
- be comfy doing presentations and chatting about the benefits of Shared Lives in meetings;
- have a full driving license and use of a car (for getting out and about around Lincolnshire); and, amongst some other bits and bobs that are in our person specification;
- have a huge heart, an open mind, determination, professionalism and genuineness.

Before you apply, we just want to let you know some key information about our selection process.

Once you click to apply, you’ll be taken to our external recruitment platform called 'Applied'. Applied are the only hiring software with diversity and fairness built into every step of the process and we’re very proud to partner with them to help us deliver a non-bias recruitment experience.

Once you register your details on the site, you’ll be asked for your EDI information such as your age, gender, ethnicity etc. You’ll also be asked questions around whether your parents went to university and whether you had free meals at school which help them to measure socio-economic factors. These questions are set by Applied experts based on extensive research and expertise and you can find out more about this here.

If you still prefer not to answer, that’s no problem at all as there’s also an option to select ‘prefer not to say’.

The only EDI related information that we will see about you is if you tell us that you have any reasonable adjustments needed at any part of our process.

We also welcome any feedback you might have about our approach so there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to give this as part of the process.

**Shared Lives Referral driver - Shared Lives Lincolnshire**
**Job ref: RD0042025**
**Location: 10B Market Place, Sleaford Lincolnshire NG34 7SR**
**Salary: £26,742 per year**

**Hours: 37 per week**