Health Visitor

NHS Jobs; Bridgwater; On-site; GBP 36,000 - 48,000; Full time

Job summary

Somerset Council is seeking an experienced Health Visitor to coordinate and deliver skilled care, addressing health inequalities and working within Early Help services to promote integrated care. You will lead a health visiting team, manage a geographic caseload, collaborate with schools, health services and social care, and ensure safeguarding, data quality, and effective care planning.

The role also requires DBS clearance and fluency in English; strong partnership work and commitment to

Qualifications

• DBS check required prior to appointment.
• Fluent English essential for customer-facing role.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate and deliver skilled care to promote health and tackle disadvantage and inequality, contributing to integrated Early Help Services.
• Provide professional and team leadership to manage a defined team delivering care to a geographical caseload, assessing needs and coordinating interventions.
• Work with vulnerable children and families within safeguarding policies, offering specialist health guidance to children, families and schools.
• Partner with health, education and social care to plan, implement, monitor and review intervention programmes for the caseload.
• Identify vulnerable/at-risk children, respond to abuse incidents, and ensure child protection documentation complies with guidelines.
• Attend local policy groups and participate in projects, audits and research to improve service delivery.
• Maintain knowledge of public health targets and governance, aligning practice with national frameworks and priorities.
• Manage care plans and allocate workloads within the health visiting team, monitoring outcomes and reviewing effectiveness.
• Collaborate with families and agencies to promote healthy lifestyles and parenting, delivering education and support programmes.
• Provide safe clinical advice and prescribers formulary guidance where appropriate.
• Investigate complaints and incidents and complete risk assessments per policy.
• Offer guidance to families to access available support services and strengthen safeguarding.
• Uphold equality, diversity, health, safety, and organisational values in all activity.

Job description

Key Responsibilities

• 1. Responsible for ensuring the co‑ordination and delivery of skilled, effective care to promote positive health and respond to identified, individual client and population/community needs. This will reflect the prime objective of tackling disadvantage and inequality to impact on the health divide and effectively participate in the mainstream development of Early Help Services to fully embrace the ethos of integrated care delivery.
• 2. Provide professional and team leadership to manage a defined team delivering care to a geographical caseload/population. Undertake an ongoing community health needs profile of the caseload identifying individual, family and community needs affecting health and social well-being, including Emotional Health Screening, assessing the need for specific services and ensuring that the appropriate level of interaction is provided and co‑ordinated.
• 3. Work with vulnerable children and families in line with national and local policies relating to safeguarding children and provide specialist support and advice to children, families and schools regarding the health and wellbeing needs of children.
• 4. Work in partnership with other agencies, particularly health services, education and social care. Manage and co‑ordinate programmes of intervention for a caseload made up of individual children and families, to plan, implement, monitor and review programmes of intervention based on identified individual health and social needs.
• 5. Identify those children who are vulnerable and/or at risk from harm. Respond appropriately to incidents of actual or suspected abuse and to ensure that child protection practice is in line with local and national guidelines and policies and prioritise court reports and Child Protection documentation.
• 6. Attend professionally related working groups as appropriate, which are involved in developing and agreeing local policies, protocols and standard setting to identify and respond to local health needs. Participate in projects, pilots, research and audit as and when required by the Organisation.
• 7. Maintain a working knowledge of, and participate at a local level in, the delivery of public health targets, local delivery plan, business plan, benchmarking and governance plans and Childrens National Service Framework targets, ensuring that practice reflects their objectives.
• 8. Responsible for care plans/programmes delegated to members of the health visiting team, providing clear measurable outcomes and developing systems to review the effectiveness of care. Maintain communication through Healthy Child Meetings allocating work to appropriate professionals.
• 9. Work in partnership with families and other agencies to promote and support a healthy lifestyle and positive parenting. Develop, deliver and evaluate programmes of education and support to targeted individuals and groups within the community.
• 10. Provide safe and competent advice for individual clients receiving care for a condition for which the Health Visitor takes clinical responsibility. Prescribe from the Nurse Prescribers Formulary for District Nurses and Health Visitors, from the Nurse Prescribers Extended Formulary or to act as a supplementary prescriber, where appropriate qualifications have been achieved.
• 11. Investigate and report complaints and incidents at a team level (as appropriate) and in accordance with the Organisations complaints and incident reporting policies and complete risk assessment.
• 12. Offer advice, guidance and support to children and families to develop good practice and publicise the available areas of assistance.
• 13. Understand, uphold and promote the aims of the councils equality, diversity and inclusion policies; health, safety and wellbeing of self and others; and Organisational values in everything you do. Equality and Diversity practice covers both interaction with staff, service users and communities and includes challenging discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity for all.

Contacts & Relationships

• Children, young people and families.
• Education Providers, Head Teachers and Schools.
• Community Services, Fire and Police.
• Public Health Directorate, Somerset CCG.
• Heads of Service, Children and Young People Provider Services and Locality Leads.
• Primary Care GP practices.
• Midwifery Services, Paediatric Services, Integrated Therapy Services.
• Voluntary Sector.
• External relationships with other agencies and Acute NHS Trusts.

Resources

Manage the local team within the agreed resources (financial and personnel). This will include physical resources e.g. pharmaceutical items and efficient and effective use of staffing resources. Establish within available resources, specific interventions to enable early intervention. Ensure all loans of equipment are monitored and reviewed regularly in line with agreed protocols and guidelines, eg enuresis alarms, CONI equipment. Prioritise work and manage time effectively by utilising individuals skills, knowledge and competencies and co‑ordinate monthly Team meetings as appropriate. Enable and support the development of skills and competencies of all members of the team through ongoing supervision, regular appraisal and the development of individual Personal Development Plans, including preceptorship and act as an assessor for pre/post registration students and providing community/public health knowledge. Deliver training programmes on behalf of the service to internal and external services as appropriate. Recommend and initiate improvements in service delivery to clients and to implement changes in practice, where appropriate. Provide and participate in clinical supervision on a regular basis as per policy and guidelines for best practice.

Further information specific to this job

The successful candidate has a responsibility for promoting and safeguarding the welfare of the children and young people they are responsible for or come into contact with. Somerset Council is subject to Part 7 of the Immigration Act (2016) and therefore the ability to speak fluent English will be an essential requirement for customer-facing roles. This job requires a criminal background check (DBS) via the disclosure procedure.