CYP Peer Support Worker

Do you have lived experience of accessing mental health services yourself in adolescence? Do you want to use your lived experience to help others?

An exciting opportunity has arisen for passionate individuals, with lived experience of mental distress and engaging in support from a mental health/emotional wellbeing service during adolescence, to join our award winning Children and Young People (CYP) Peer Support Team. We have part-time positions available covering Boston and surrounding areas (Spalding and Skegness), and/or Louth and surrounding areas.

As a peer support worker working with children and adolescents, we are looking for individuals who can understand and relate to the experiences of young people using our services, and the current issues and challenges that impact on young people's mental health and emotional wellbeing.

As the peer support team works across a number of our CYP teams (Healthy Minds Lincolnshire, CAMHS, Mental Health Support Teams, CYP Keyworker Service) it is important for applicants to have excellent communication skills, and an ability work creatively to support a young person's recovery.

Please note, applicants will need to be able to travel independently across the county without reliance on public transport.

If you would like to know more about this role, please contact Abbie Futter (CAMHS Peer Support and Involvement Lead) on 01522 535189

Peer Support Workers provide emotional support and practical assistance to young people currently accessing CYP Services. Through sharing their own experiences of recovery, Peer Support Workers will build positive and trusting relationships, helping young people and families discover their own strengths and feel hopeful about their future.

Duties of the role include

Modelling principles of hope, recovery and self-belief in all aspects of their work with young

people and families.

Sharing coping, self-help and self-management techniques with children, young people and their

carers. This often includes promoting and completing recovery and wellness plans with young people, both individually and in group settings.

Supporting young people to access the community or other meaningful activity to promote their

emotional and social development.

Supporting young people who may be struggling with transitions out of, or across, services.

Contributing to the development of children and young person’s involvement and participation in our CYP services to ensure we are capturing and acting on lived experience voices in the context of service development.

Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health services and a number of learning disability, autism and social care services in the county of Lincolnshire. Employing around 2,800 staff, and serving a population of over 766,000, our people lie at the heart of everything we do.

You could be part of a Trust rated by staff as one of the best mental health and learning disability trusts in England, in an area heralded as a fantastic place to live and work. We firmly believe the key to high quality care is a contented workforce. This is reflected in our Care Quality Commission rating of ‘outstanding’ for well-led and ‘good’ overall. In the most recent National NHS Staff Survey, our staff rated us as the number one trust nationally for staff morale and one of the top scoring NHS Trusts in the Midlands for being compassionate and inclusive. We’re really proud of this!

We are also leading the way in transforming care, with multi-million-pound transformation of patient environments and radical redesign of community services.

This is the time to join and help redesign our services of the future. We offer options for flexible working and provide a wide range of training and promotion opportunities in all professions. We support and celebrate diversity, have active staff networks groups and are always looking at what more we can do to support our staff.

The role of a Child and Young Person (CYP) Peer Support Worker (PSW) has been developed

specifically for individuals who have lived experience of mental distress and have used mental health services. A CYP PSW would have lived experience of accessing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and/or engaged in treatment or support from a mental health/emotional wellbeing service when an adolescent.

Under the supervision of senior peer support workers and qualified mental health practitioners, the CYP PSW will support the delivery of a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary community mental health service for children and young people. The PSW will do this through providing emotional support to young people and families to help them meet their recovery goals. Through sharing their own experience, PSW’s will inspire hope and belief that recovery is possible, helping young people to feel more positively about their future.

Peer support workers also play a key role in challenging mental health stigma through supporting the delivery of mental health/emotional wellbeing workshops and awareness raising activities to promote understanding of mental health difficulties amongst young people and families, and the wider general public.