Criminal Justice Peer Support Worker

Do you have personal experience of mental distress, health or social vulnerability, and involvement with the Criminal Justice System? Have you achieved stability in your recovery and want to use your experience to support others?

Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is expanding its Peer Support Service within the RECONNECT team. This role will involve supporting individuals accessing both RECONNECT and Liaison & Diversion services, helping them improve health outcomes, engage with services, and work towards recovery goals.

Using your lived experience, you will build trusting relationships, offer encouragement and practical support, promote hope and recovery, and help individuals navigate health, social care, housing, and community services.

The successful candidate will have lived experience of mental health challenges or vulnerability, alongside personal experience of being remanded or sentenced within a custodial setting and have demonstrated a sustained period of stability within the community.

You will work collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams and partner agencies, promoting person-centred, recovery-focused support while maintaining professional boundaries and accurate records.

Please note:
Applicants must clearly demonstrate both aspects of lived experience within their application. Appointment is subject to DBS checks and applicants must not be on the adult or child barred lists.

• Support service users directly including one to one or in small groups.
• Support service users with their integration into the community.
• Initiate, establish and maintain relationships with service users in a variety of settings (including, homes, NHFT sites and in the community)
• Share and discuss common experiences with service users in an appropriate manner.
• Work under the direction and leadership of registered professionals, undertaking duties using a recovery focus
• Support people with their emotional, personal, and physical needs.
• Develop a trusting and mutually beneficial rapport with service users
• Act as a coach and mentor to service users by providing information about support and services available to them within NHFT and the local community.
• Develop links across other organisations that support service users.

NHFT is an NHS Community and Mental Health Foundation Trust, providing physical, mental health and specialty services in hospital settings and in the community. We provide over 200 services across the county - as well as some specialist services in bordering and nearby counties. We work together with our partners to ensure that everyone who comes through our doors receives compassionate, person-centred care, regardless of their background or circumstances.

NHFT promotes a culture of learning, to improve the care and safety of our patients and colleagues. We have achieved our ‘outstanding’ rating by encouraging opportunity, innovation, development and growth across our workforce.

At NHFT we believe that work should be rewarded in every sense which is why we are proud to an accredited living wage employer.

We aim to support financial wellbeing and create an environment where are people feel valued and able to thrive.

It is recognized that people in prison are vulnerable and experience avoidable differences in health and wellbeing. Support to engage with health services can provide an opportunity to connect with people who have not previously accessed routine health services to thereby improve health outcomes following release.

Leaving prison is a time of change when provision of health services necessarily transfers from one team to another, increasing the risk that any benefits achieved…