This is an exciting opportunity to join an evolving and innovative team working within the London Borough of Wandsworth Local Authority. The Family Safeguarding Team works within Children’s Services and provides mental health assessment and intervention to parents and carers of children open to Children’s Social Care on Child in Need and Child Protection Plans. Within the London Borough of Wandsworth, the wider Family Safeguarding model seeks to provide multidisciplinary support to families and comprises of Social Workers, Mental Health Practitioners, Child Practitioners, Drug and Alcohol Workers, Domestic Abuse Practitioners and Domestic Abuse Workers. The Mental Health Practitioner will work with parents, carers of children, families and other agencies. The post-holder will be responsible for delivering clinical and evidence-based treatment and interventions to parents/partners/caregivers with a mental health condition, who may also who experience (or perpetrate) domestic abuse or misuse substances. The Family Safeguarding Team sits within the wider community adult mental health provision within Wandsworth and the post-holder will liaise with wider services to ensure smooth transitioning between services, should the need arise. The post-holder will:
Responsibilities
- Build trusting and collaborative relationships with parents, service users and their families.
- Understand what is important to the service user in their life.
- Offer help and support to the service user to develop and set goals with what is important to them and their families.
- Help them to feel hopeful about the things that are important to them.
- Provide support and advice with being involved in their community—for example housing, employment, education, welfare benefits, social life and peer support networks.
- Help service users to feel in control of their life including self-management tools and techniques.
- The mental health practitioner will also work closely with the team manager and senior leadership team around the evaluation, monitoring and development of the Family Safeguarding framework, ensuring the team is working towards and inline with the KPIs which have been set out and agreed.
- Undertake mental health needs and risk screening assessments of parents/partners/caregivers whose children are being supported by Children’s Services.
- Undertake short‑term supportive intervention work with families who have severe anxiety/mental health difficulties that impacts on their ability to engage with the Family Safeguarding Teams.
- Assist parents/partners/caregivers to engage with relevant and appropriate adult mental health services and/or refer to psychologists within the Family Safeguarding Team.
- Provide consultation on mental health issues to other professionals within the Family Safeguarding Teams, contributing to multi‑disciplinary working and, as part of that, be an approved advocate for mental health attending relevant team meetings/group supervision as needed within Family Safeguarding Teams.
- Ensure any treatment programme for mental health conditions includes an ongoing assessment of the risk of child abuse or further domestic abuse, in conjunction with other team members.
- Contribute to the development and undertake training events and workshops, disseminating knowledge around mental health difficulties to other colleagues in Family Safeguarding Teams.
- Assist the teams to ensure parents/partners (and their own carers) are screened against the social care eligibility criteria in line with the Care Act 2014 and are referred to Adult Social Care colleagues for assessments of their eligibility to funded social care.
- For those parents/partners (and their own carers) who are not eligible to funded social care, offer direct support, information and advice about managing mental health difficulties, as well as signpost to other support services.
Unless expressly stated in the job advert the role is not subject to sponsorship; please be advised that all offers of employment are subject to evidence of right to work in the UK.
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