New Roles
New
roles
A number of new roles have already
been introduced into mental health on a national basis, both to
help expand the overall workforce across health and social care and
to tailor roles to meet the specific needs of service users and
carers. These include:
• Support, Time
and Recovery (STR) workers, who support
service users by giving them time and so help
their recovery. Three pieces of national
guidance have been published. First, there was the original
Department of Health Mental
Health Policy Implementation Guide: Support, Time and Recovery
(STR) Workersof 2003. DH Publication Ref
30742. This was supported by a national implementation
programme and the learning from this has been set out in the second
publication in 2007 - A Final
Handbook, DH Publication Ref 284915. As readers can see
from the attached letter, the national
implementation team also produced a STR
Manual and Toolkit that provides additional material for the
introduction of new roles into the mental health
workforce.
And finally A Competence
Framework has been published in 2008. DH Publication Ref
288773. The relevant
Equality Impact Screening Assessment and Action
Plan are set out below.
To help support the development of the STR role, please see
attached the
STR portfolio documents. They are intended to be used to
complement your organisations documentation and not to replace them
but you mind find them useful to update and further develop
existing portfolios."
STR Portfolio
The guidance notes and
templates contained in the STR portfolio were developed to provide
a framework, and to support a consistent approach to the personal
and professional development of STR workers. Developed from
lessons learnt and examples of good practice the documents are
provided for guidance only and should compliment organisations
existing documentation. Please click here for access to the
documents STR portfolio
documents.
• Primary Care Mental Health
Workers, who are intended to provide brief
psychological
interventions, signpost and improve mental health clinical
governance in the primary
care team for people with common mental health
problems in all age
groups;14 DH (2003): Fast Forwarding Primary Care Mental
Health: Graduate Primary Care Mental Health Workers: Best Practice
Guidance. DH Publication Ref 30366.
• Community
development workers (CDWs) for black and minority ethnic
(BME)
The role of the CDWs is to act at a strategic level
as a change agent; a service developer; a capacity builder; and
access facilitators for the whole of the BME community. Three
pieces of national guidance have been produced: - Mental Health
Policy Implementation Guide: Community Development Workers for
Black and Minority Ethnic Communities: Interim Guidance(2004)
DH Publication Ref 265796. Mental Health Policy
Implementation Guide: Community Development Workers for Black and
Minority Ethnic Communities: Education and Training - Supplementary
Guidance. (2005) DH Publication Ref 271259. and the
Mental Health Policy Implementation Guide: Community
Development Workers for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities:
Final Handbook.(2006) DH Publication Ref 278271.
You can download the summary of the role of the BME CDWs
here.
To find out more about the DH Delivering Race Equality (DRE) in
Mental Health Care Programme, please click
here to go to the relevant website.
• Carer support
workers,18 DH (2002): Developing Services for
Carers and Families of People with Mental Illness. DH
Publication Ref 29778. who provide support to carers of
people with mental health problems through assessment, provision of
care and development of networks.
Other new roles designed to help meet
specific skills gaps, as well as to help cover
local recruitment needs, have been
introduced on a local basis and include:
• Assistant and
Associate Mental Health Practitioners, who provide a
mixture
of clinical and other
healthcare interventions in various settings, including
in-patient care;
• psychology
associates, who are concerned primarily with offering
therapeutic
interventions in a
specialist field, usually described by protocol;
• case
managers in the Improving Access to Psychological
Therapies Doncaster
national demonstration
site, to work with people with anxiety and depression
within a ‘stepped care’
model; and
• Peer
Supporters – people in recovery who support others who are
experiencing
mental distress within the
context of the principles of social inclusion.
The Psychology Associate
Pilot Project in the North of England
Sponsored by NIMHE, this commenced in autumn 2005 with eight
trainees,
recruited and employed in a range of
services, including adult mental health,
learning disabilities, older adults,
forensic, and children and families. The
trainees are registered for a newly
designed MSc in Psychology in Healthcare at
Northumbria University, with delivery
of key foundation module materials provided
via the Doctorate in Clinical
Psychology training programme at Newcastle
University. Early evaluation of the
experiences of the trainees and their workplace
supervisors suggests that both the
training and the emerging role is viewed as
making a valuable and sustainable
contribution to the delivery of psychological
therapies and services in the
participating NHS Trusts. The pilot will be completed
in September 2007.
Contact: John Taylor
at john.taylor@nap.nhs.uk
Individual Peer
Supporters
Individual Peer Supporters (IPS) are people who have a lived
experience of mental
distress. The IPS service in
Northampton is based in the town centre library, in a
space dedicated to well-being. Peer
Supporters are trained in, and work within the
context of, the recovery approach.
People experiencing common mental health
problems choose to use the service to
access support, information and selfmanagement
tools to assist them in their own
recovery.
Contact: Jane Shears
at jane.shears@nht.northants.nhs.uk,
Specialist Nurse
Practitioner
A really useful presentation has been
put together by some Specialist Nurse Practitioners within Mental
Health Services for Older People. Their new role was
established after the New Ways of Working for Psychiatrists report
was published, it has since had a domino effect on other colleagues
which has now effectively become New Ways of Working for Everyone.
To view the presentation, please click here.
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