Senior MHST Practitioner

The practitioner in this role will focus on providing day to day clinical oversight and support for the Education Mental Health Practitioners (EMHPs), alongside senior leadership.

The role will be working alongside community partners and developing relationships between the MHST and the educational settings where our work is based, and will act as link practitioner for a small caseload of schools. The role will ensure the efficient and effective delivery of the MHST, providing high quality, safe and responsive specialist mental health services to children, young people, parents/carers and professionals provided in accordance with Children and Young People’s mental health training principles, in partnership with service users and partner agencies, working as part of a multi-agency system

The post holder may have supervisory responsibility/co-responsibility for EMHP clinicians within the MHST and will also work as part of a senior’s team, supporting the Team Leaders and Clinical Service Leads with the new pathway.

The post is currently being recruited to within the existing service structure. The service may be subject to a future procurement process, and any subsequent changes will be managed in accordance with NHS employment policies and relevant legislation.

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• To manage a defined caseload of children and young people presenting with emotional health and wellbeing difficulties in schools
• To co-ordinate and deliver individualised care packages / programmes for children and young people and evaluate these programmes, ensuring high standards of practice in accordance with national guidelines and trust policy.
• To provide specialist mental health advice, consultation and signposting using an outcome-based triage model to education settings
• To demonstrate the ability to work as an autonomous specialist practitioner in relation to their specialist area and in clinic which will include the reading and recording of the clinical observations of each child and the ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of treatment packages.

The MHSTs are a service designed to help meet the mental health needs of children and young people in education settings. They are made up of senior clinicians, CAMHS Practitioners and Education Wellbeing Practitioners (EWPs).

They are based across education settings as an additional resource within a whole-system approach to promote resilience and wellbeing, to support earlier intervention, enable appropriate signposting and deliver evidence-based support, care and interventions.

The MHSTs is partnered with their education settings to design a bespoke offer, based on a school’s individual needs and works with the mental health services that are already in place, such as counselling, educational psychology, school nurses, pastoral care, educational welfare officers, VCSEs, the local authority, including children’s social care, and NHS Children and Young People Mental Health Services (CYPMHS).

Our MHST currently works with 14 schools across Croydon. The successful candidate will be employed by Croydon CAMHS and will be expected to liaise with CAMHS teams when appropriate. The MHST deliver emotional wellbeing interventions using Guided Self Help strategies.

For further details / informal visits contact: Name: Charlie Aretuemhen Job title: MHST Clinical Service Lead Croydon Email address: charlie.aretuemhen@slam.nhs.uk