Healthy Living Practitioner

Go back Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust

The closing date is 03 March 2026

We have an exciting opportunity for a motivated clinician to join the Healthy Living Team at Guy's and St Thomas' trust, to provide a high quality service at outpatient and community specialist clinics/groups for those living with obesity.

As a band 5 healthy living practitioner, you will autonomously use evidence-based principles/current best practice of exercise, nutrition and behaviour change techniques to assess, plan and implement healthy lifestyle management, within the Physiotherapy and Nutrition and Dietetics Departments .

This post is a static role within the healthy living physiotherapy team across both sites of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust as well as some community sites in South East London boroughs.

Please refer to the job description for more details

• To be professionally and legally responsible for all aspects of the post holders own work
• To carry out assessment of patients as an autonomous practitioner, and to use clinical reasoning skills and knowledge of evidence based practice to formulate appropriate care plan utilising a range of treatment skills and options
• To use specialist knowledge of obesity as a disease and other known associative health conditions to tailor exercise programmes individually following professional and department guidelines
• To use specialist nutrition knowledge, assessment and analysis to provide individualised nutritional advice in line with professional guidelines and best evidence base
• To use specialist knowledge of behaviour change techniques to assist with service users with long term behaviour change. Demonstrate a knowledge base of behaviour change theories.
• To recommend best course of intervention based on accurate physical and nutritional assessments, developing comprehensive onwards follow up plans following discharge from the service
• To work with and seek appropriate guidance from Registered Dietitians and Physiotherapists in clinical decision making when required

Department Information

The Physiotherapy and the Nutrition & Dietetics Departments are within the Therapies & Rehabilitation and the Medical Specialties Clinical Directorates, respectively. The combined departments have over 400 staff and provide services across the Trust. The Healthy Living service is managed within both departments and this post specifically within the Physiotherapy Rehabilitation Service and its Clinical Lead Physiotherapist. The service provides nutritional and physiotherapy support to outpatients living with overweight and obesity and to staff throughout the department who manage overweight and obese patients.

Organisational Values:

Our values help us to define and develop our culture,
what we do and how we do it
. It is important that you understand and reflect these values throughout your employment with the Trust.

The post holder will be:

• Ambitious - we innovate and strive for excellence
• Inclusive - we respect each other and work collaboratively

Our values and behaviours framework|describes what it means for every one of us in the Trust to put our values into action.

• To implement policy changes that impact on all service users, and advise team leader of any service development changes made, to ensure quality standards and effectiveness of patient care.
• With guidance, to identify situations where service improvement is required due to reduced effectiveness, efficiency and/or quality.
• With guidance, to take appropriate action to challenge the area of development via applying a range of standard research methods/tools and evaluating the outcome.

• To be responsible for competent use and maintenance reporting of all equipment used on each community and outpatient site including any free weights or gym equipment

• To participate in the supervision, teaching and appraisal of assistants and technical instructors as required
• To contribute to supporting dietitian and physiotherapy students on placement

• To maintain an accurate and evaluative record keeping system (POMR) for own clinical caseload
• To supervise assistant record keeping system according to departmental standards

• To flexibly plan and organise own time, patient caseload, meetings and training and to adjust plans as required according to staffing levels.
• To support junior members of the team and delegate tasks as appropriate, for example exercise class allocation.
• To ensure smooth organisation of patient group work including gym classes

• To be able to motivate and persuade others through effective communication skills, with the benefit of verbal and non-verbal skills, using written and electronic information where needed
• To demonstrate the ability to communicate complex and sensitive information to patient, carers and other staff, where there may be barriers to communication i.e.…