Primary Care Mental Health Practitioner

  • Full Time
  • United Kingdom
  • 47,951 to 56,863 £ / Year

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

Job summary

An exciting opportunity has arisen to work in the Primary Care Mental Health Team (PCMHT). We are looking for an experienced mental health practitioner; nurse, social worker, psychologist or occupational therapist to join the team.

From working in the team you will be able to gain more knowledge of completing triage assessments, having a caseload and offering short term interventions. The team is made of a diverse MDT, we offer teaching sessions, space for reflective practice and an opportunity to be a champion in your chosen areas.

You will be working as part of a Primary Care Mental Health Team to deliver timely assessments, care planning and evidenced based health and psychosocial care interventions to the adult population in Lewisham with mental health needs. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to interface directly with partner agencies including Primary Care, Secondary Care and MIND to ensure effective service delivery and discharge planning.

The PCMHT’s are now working directly with Primary Care and sharing the same electronic record system and the successful candidate will receive training. The team works with our newly developed Care Process Model to ensure our patients and carers receive standardised care.

Main duties of the job

  • To support the team with overall management of referrals, providing timely screening, triage and trusted assessments for patients with a wide range of mental disorder.
  • To be professionally accountable for a delivering a range of evidenced based psycho-social interventions for a specific case list.
  • To work in collaboration with our partner agencies and the MDT to provide a range of interventions to support service users to stay well within their local communities including psychological, social prescribing and medication advice and management
  • To work with patients and carers using evidenced based tool to inform care planning to support engagement with treatment and appropriate services.
  • To support family and carers with the management of risk and to escalate all risk concerns as required ensuring that there is clear communication of risk to all involved with care.
  • To develop a close relationship with Primary Care practices with the PCN, attending practice meetings and effective communication

Person Specification

Education and Qualification

Essential

  • Holdd a professional qualification
  • Evidence of recent continued professional development.

Desirable

  • A commitment to completing quality improvement training.
  • Mentorship or equivalent

Experience

Essential

  • Relevant clinical experience.
  • Demonstrate ability to complete good quality research based/reflective practice e.g. understanding and ability to use supervision to reflect on skills, attitude and knowledge and develop these by using evidence-based practice.
  • Knowledge of relevant professional and clinical legislation.
  • Ability to proactively and independently manage a workload.
  • Experience of successfully providing a range of clinical interventions, including triage and assessment, to people in the designated care group with a variety of health problems.

Desirable

  • Experience of working in primary care
  • Experience of developing and facilitating teaching programme for staff.
  • Experience of working in a community mental health setting.
  • Experience of psychological assessment and treatment of clients with a range of psychological needs of a complex nature in adult mental health.

Knowledge

Essential

  • An understanding of the relationship between primary and secondary care services.
  • Awareness of racial and diversity issues and factors affecting access to mental health care.
  • Knowledge of key legislation and guidelines in relation to statutory mental health responsibilities, including Safeguarding Adults, Young people and children.
  • An understanding of the stepped care model of delivery of psychological therapies for depression, anxiety and personality disorder.
  • Ability to provide quality care that is responsive to service user needs, without close supervision.

Desirable

  • Theoretical knowledge of psychopathology and the evidence base for the relevant treatment.
  • Knowledge of the theory of psychological models, such as CBT, DBT, or MBT.

Skills and Abilities

Essential

  • Highly developed verbal and written communication skills including communicating complex, highly technical and sensitive information to clients, their families and colleagues.
  • Ability to identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance as appropriate and to support and maintain clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive and/or challenging behaviour.
  • Effective IT skills.
  • Good organisational skills.
  • Skills in emotional resilience: able to cope in difficult interpersonal situations.

Desirable

  • Accredited practitioner skills in at least one model of psychological therapy.
  • Accredited nurse prescriber
  • Ability to contribute to, monitor and implement changes and improvements to services.
  • Specialised clinical skills, e.g. group work, anxiety/anger management, family work skills

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).

UK Registration

Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see
NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).

Closing Date: 19 July 2026

To apply for this job please visit apps.trac.jobs.