NursingNetUK

Job overview

Are you ready to unlock your potential within a challenging, creative and fast paced work environment? Do you want to escape your current job role and work with people to build positive and productive lives, whatever their past? Now is the time to break into offender healthcare and develop your career.

Oxleas NHS trust were awarded the South West prison contract in 2022 and currently have a portfolio of 19 prisons across the South of England. We are currently looking to expand our pool of bank workers by recruiting Mental Health Practitioners to work within the Prison service on a flexible basis.

Our healthcare team have a real impact on promoting health and well-being to those in prison and we pride ourselves on using skills and strategies that instil hope for patients future resettlement back into the community. We directly deliver Mental Health, Physical Health, Pharmacy and Clinical Substance Misuse in an integrated healthcare delivery model to provide effective and responsive care to improve wellbeing and support better outcomes in the future.

Main duties of the job

As a Mental Health Practitioner you will be providing specialist mental healthcare to offenders and working as part of the Mental Health In-Reach Team, plus wider mental health services.  You will be required to work in a psychologically minded way with offenders in achieving their agreed goals and quality health outcomes.

Our Mental Health Team provide specialist interventions at primary and secondary care level including; referral management, screening assessment, triage, evidence-based interventions, care planning and risk assessing, plus one-to-one and group-work facilitation.

Our Mental Health Practitioners manage a mixed and challenging caseload and are required to perform robust assessment, screening and interventions to offenders with learning disabilities and mental health conditions. You will contribute to alternatives to inpatient admission and assisting with early discharge through the implementation of high intensity interventions and complex case management arrangements.

One of our key aims is to ensure continuity of care for an offender on ordinary location and reduce the length of stay, both in relation to prison inpatient services and external NHS/independent in-patient services. You will work closely with community mental health teams to ensure appropriate sharing of information, continuity of care and the Care Programme Approach for all offenders as necessary.

Working for our organisation

Oxleas – About Us

Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.

We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.

Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families.  This is strengthened by our new values:

• We’re Kind
• We’re Fair
• We Listen
• We Care