Job summary

The role of Peer Support Worker has been developed specifically for people who have lived experience of mental distress, or experience of caring for a friend or family member experiencing mental distress. Through sharing wisdom from their own experiences, peer support workers will inspire hope and belief that recovery is achievable.

The Forensic Healthcare Service is a dynamic service consisting of the Forensic Outreach and Liaison Service, low and medium secure services, a high dependency rehabilitation unit, and the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway Service with the National Probation Service.

The Forensic Outreach and Liaison Service (FOLS) is a community-based service in Sussex providing holistic support to individuals with a mental health issue that relates to their offending/risk behaviour.

Our service has a strong commitment to recovery, multi-disciplinary working, service user involvement, and equality.

Main duties of the job

As the Peer Support worker you will work collaboratively to assist in improving the wellbeing of service users within the FOLS team, as wekk as their families and carers.

Examples include:

• To support individuals who are overcoming mental health challenges in their journey to recovery and wellbeing.
• To be a positive role model for service users and use parts of your recovery story, where appropriate, to inspire hope.
• To support and enable individuals to resolve conflicts and regain control, responsibility, hope and enjoyment based on the principles of peer supported recovery.
• Using a peer approach, working with service users (both individually and/or in groups) to meet holistic needs (e.g. education, welfare, employment, financial, leisure, housing and spiritual), alongside the multidisciplinary care team (MDT).
• Supporting service users to engage in participation, co-production and service development opportunities

This role is a vital part of our plan to continually improve the service we provide and is aimed at people who have lived experience of using mental health care services. We are looking for people who can use their experience of mental distress, recovery and use of peer networks to inspire others.

We have a strong network of diverse and supportive peer support colleagues who meet regularly as part of peer networking across Sussex. We offer full training to new peer support workers, one-to one peer supervision and ongoing development opportunities

About us

Sussex Partnership provides mental health and learning disability care for all age groups across Sussex.

Working in Sussex:

• Travel easily between coast and countryside, with a blend of picturesque villages and seaside towns there's always new experiences to be enjoyed
• Embrace the city life with great access to visit Brighton and London
• With easy access to Gatwick and Heathrow and excellent railway links across the UK there is plenty of opportunity for adventure.

We'd love you to join our organisation that is rated 'good' overall and 'outstanding' for caring by the Care Quality Commission. Our staff agree, with 82% of people in our recent staff survey telling us that they recognise that high quality care is our top priority.