Peer Support Worker - Liaison and Diversion ServiceinGuildfordinGuildfordPUBLISHED MON 6 JAN 2025

Surrey Liaison and Diversion Service and Reconnect Team are seeking to recruit two enthusiastic, highly motivated, Peer Support Worker with lived experience of mental health/criminal justice system/emotional distress to join our team.

Our passionate service supports those who have come into contact with the youth and criminal justice system with a caring, compassionate, person-centered approach to vulnerability screening and assessment for all those above the age of 10. This continues through to providing high quality community-based interventions to not only improve health and social care outcomes but also aim to reduce future re-offending.

You will work collaboratively with your colleagues to provide much needed lived experience peer support to those we support.

Your will be based within the community, working alongside our Assertive Outreach Team and Reconnect Team. You will be required to travel during the working day, and role is Surrey wide. Full driving licence is required. Our Peer Support Workers work between 09:00 - 17:00.

To provide one-to-one support for people from a lived experience perspective, in whatever environment is suitable and applicable to the service user. This will be focused on helping provide support with strategies to manage activities of daily living such as self-care, caring for their home, pursuit of leisure activities and accessing healthcare.

To assume a 'coaching' role within the MDT, supporting vulnerable individuals to develop personal recovery and resettlement plans.

To model/mentor a recovery process and demonstrate coping skills using own experience of recovery.

To use personal, experiential knowledge and to share lived experience, in building safe, trusting relationships with named vulnerable persons.

Our Liaison and Diversion Service is committed and dedicated to developing our Practitioners.by encouraging and providing opportunities for Continued Professional Development, participation in Quality Improvement initiatives

About us

To build safe, trusting relationships with service users to empower and enable each individual vulnerable person, in a non-directive, non-prescriptive way, to discover and make use of their own strengths and to build and strengthen positive connections with their peers, networks and wider communities

To provide additional telephone support to named vulnerable individuals using a work phone and within work hours between face-to-face meetings as agreed

To enable and support vulnerable individuals to identify, choose and develop their own recovery/ wellbeing/ personal plans, crisis plans and personal network maps where they wish to do so

To provide equivalent support, informally (where the vulnerable individual chooses not to make use of formal, written plans), through open, non-judgmental listening and sharing of lived experience in order to validate the vulnerable individuals experiential knowledge, empower them to make plans, decisions and choices, realise their own strengths and build positives connections and relationships

From the outset of the peer support relationship, to discuss, with named vulnerable persons, the time-limited nature of the peer support and in particular the opportunity to use the relationship as a means to building and strengthening the vulnerable individuals wider network of support and relationships.

To liaise and work in partnership with other services within the Trust, primary care, voluntary sector and community groups locally as necessary to support named vulnerable persons.

To contribute information regarding support provided and the safety and wellbeing of people which can inform assessment, planning implementation and review of care with the multidisciplinary team.

To hand over issues of risk, safety and safeguarding, having explained this first to the vulnerable person, following locally agreed procedures for risk and safety management.