Mental Health Support Team (MHST) West Suffolk - Clinical LeadNHS
Job summary
Ambitious, creative, clinically skilled? Passionate about mental health services for children and young people?
This is an exciting opportunity to join Suffolk's innovative Mental Health Support Team (MHST) as a Clinical Lead. MHSTs play a key role in delivering early intervention within education settings, ensuring children and young people access appropriate mental health support more quickly.
You will provide leadership, clinical expertise and operational support, working closely with the West Area Leadership Team, to deliver a high-quality service.
The team is currently transitioning to a new Neighbourhood Team model and preparing for further expansion from January 2027. Initially, you will support this transition before helping to implement and develop the new model.
Based in the West Area, covering West Suffolk, you will be part of a leadership team supporting three Neighbourhood Teams. Within the first year of the post, there will be a requirement to also support the East Area covering five Neighbourhood Teams in East Suffolk to support maternity leave cover and the wider expansion and development of the team.
Applications are welcomed from a range of professional backgrounds but must have a relevant professional therapy qualification or equivalent.
Interviews are anticipated to take place on 17th September.
Main duties of the job
You will be responsible for providing a high-quality early intervention service to children, young people (and their families) experiencing mild to moderate mental health difficulties. You will build relationships with and work across a range of education settings.
The role combines direct specialist clinical assessment, formulation and intervention with clinical leadership and delegated operational leadership with responsibility for clinical quality, caseload management, supervision structures, risk escalation, governance, outcome monitoring, service development and partnership working.
You will use your clinical skills and experience for direct delivery of evidence-based interventions, consultation to education settings and delivery of whole/school college approaches. You will utilise skills and knowledge of CBT and child and adolescent mental health practice and support service delivery and development through collaboration and coproduction.
You will clinically supervise and line manage Senior Clinicians (Band 7). You will work with the West MHST Area Leadership team to share responsibilities to support the team. Travel across Suffolk will be required.
Job description
A job in the Suffolk MHSTs will inevitably be challenging and demanding at times, but it will also be immensely rewarding and provide you with great opportunities to make a genuine difference to the lives of others. You will join a service that has developed a caring, creative and hard-working environment; your ideas about how this service continues to develop and grow will be highly valued.
This is an exciting time of MHST expansion as we move to covering 100% of education settings, including independent and specialist schools.. In Suffolk, NSFT are developing and transforming our other early intervention mental health services and working closely with our partners in the Local Authority and the Voluntary Sector. Changes across services are driven by the needs of local communities, with the aim of embedding mental health services within the community and truly bringing the expertise to where it is needed.
We would welcome any informal conversations about these roles, including about the possibility of part-time/job shares. Please do contact us for more information.
For further details regarding the role, please see the attached job description and person.
About us
At Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, inclusion is at the heart of how we work. We are committed to creating a fair, transparent and accessible recruitment process where every candidate has the opportunity to succeed.
We actively encourage applications from people from all backgrounds, particularly those currently underrepresented in our workforce, including those from the global majority. We recognise that not everyone has equal access to opportunities and are working to address this.
We are committed to providing reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process and ensuring all candidates receive a positive and equitable experience.
Here at NSFT we pride ourselves on being a welcoming, talented, friendly and supportive team who like nothing better than sharing experiences and learning from each other. In addition to ongoing training and development opportunities, we are committed to providing an environment in which you can thrive.
Why work for us? We have challenges as a Trust, but we have ambitious aspirations, are pushing ahead with exciting transformation work and we need dedicated individuals to support us on our journey. We have strong, established professional networks coupled with an exceptional leadership team who will ensure you are truly cared for and cared about.