Access/Duty Social Worker - Adults' Mental Health Team

Our benefits

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits:

• Flexible and creative working arrangements
• Flexible Bank Holidays
• A comprehensive wellbeing package
• Our Cambs Rewards employee discounts
• A comprehensive pension scheme
• IDEAL staff equality, diversity and inclusion network
• Camweb our staff intranet helping to keep you informed
• An employee recognition scheme

For our Social Workers, we offer more specific benefits like:

• Generous annual leave provision (28 days, plus bank holidays)
• A supportive management team that will champion your learning and development
• Employee Assistance Programme – access to free support 24 hours a day
• Payment for business mileage expenses (45p per mile)
• Scalable retention payments to loyal social workers in specific teams after the first full year of employment, starting at £900 which increases during the first three years of service
• A pay progression scheme to enable our Social Workers to accelerate through the pay grade as you gain experience and skills.
• A relocation package of up to £8000 for eligible candidates
• Plus, 6 days of protected time each year to enable our Social Workers to maintain their Continuous Professional Development. 

Please read our benefits brochure attached for more information.

About the role

We have a new and exciting opportunity for a full time Social Worker to be part of a brand new Access/Duty team within the 18 – 64 adult mental health services in Cambridgeshire (including Huntingdon and Fenland.)

We have two roles available:

• 1 x full-time, permanent role
• 1 x full-time, 12 month secondment for internal candidates or 12 month fixed term contract for external applicants

You will be supported to work flexibly with the opportunity to mix home and office working as guided by the needs of the team.  You will have management and peer support.

The role of a Mental Health Social Worker is hard to define, but that’s because of the breadth and depth of the work we do - which means no two days are ever the same.

There are many of benefits that are very specific to Mental Health Teams.  These include:

• Opportunities in both Cambridgeshire County Council and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust for development, as well as specialist and individual training.
• Working in a multi-disciplinary team with Doctors, Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Psychologists and Psychiatrists.
• Weekly team meetings where you can discuss cases receiving advice and peer support so achieving the best outcomes for service users.
• Clear professional pathways and opportunities for progression including opportunities for funded training to become an AMHP.  One of our social workers states “‘Having recently started working in Adult’s Mental Health as part of the Social Worker Team I am learning how our role fits within the wider Multi-Disciplinary Cambridge Adult Locality Team (CALT). Our days are never the same and we work with a variety of individuals and professionals. As Social Workers we are able to work flexibly from home and the office alongside ensuring our relationships with our colleagues are maintained through regular Team Meetings and Supervisions. I have found the Social Worker Team and Adult Locality Teams so welcoming with a vast amount of knowledge and experience between them.  There is also a wide variety of support and training provided not only from CCC and the NHS, but from colleagues to ensure that we are providing the best support we can with the individuals we work with.’
• Supportive managers who promote a culture where you feel safe in your practice. As one social worker comments “the managers give you autonomy to be able to make decisions. They trust you as a Social Worker to know what’s best for the service users you work with"

You may be wondering why you should join our Adult Mental Health Teams… Well, here are some of the reasons our Social Workers gave: 

• It’s impossible to be bored in mental health social work and the skills you gain are so varied.
• The role of the Mental Health Social Worker is really aligned with the core values of social work that encourages you to see a person holistically.
• In our work, we really focus on people’s strengths and recovery. We have clear goals and work in partnership to achieve these.
• Working in partnership with health colleagues means there is a lot of knowledge and resource sharing. My knowledge and skills have vastly improved due to working with health professionals.

For more information about this role call Nathalie on 01223 699263. Alternatively, you can email us on welovesocialworkers@cambridgeshire.gov.uk or visit our website for more information.

This is a rolling campaign, and we will review applications daily so please don't wait for the closing date to apply, we want to speak to you now!

Please note if applying for a secondment an employee must speak to their line manager before applying for a secondment role, to confirm that they can be released from their substantive post.

We know that your time is precious, so our interviews are generally held virtually, by Microsoft Teams, to provide the most flexible recruitment process. 

Appointment to this post will be subject to the outcome of an Enhanced Disclosure obtained through the Disclosure and Barring Service. The Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

What will you be doing?

Social Work Adult Mental Health – Overview of Access Tasks:

• Manage enquiries from health and social care administrators concerning people open to the service who are not currently allocated.
• Manage enquiries from health and social care administrators concerning people who have an allocated social worker who is absent from work - consider if enquiry can wait for the worker to return or undertake action if needed urgently.
• Triage new referrals in partnership with Social Work Managers.
• Respond to urgent referrals (based on agreement with Social Work Managers) – this may be contacts, visits or completing urgent Adult Social Care assessments (AKA Care Act assessments) and Care and Support plans.
• Attend Allocations/referrals' meeting and take actions forward as agreed during the meeting.  
• Carry out planned pieces of work e.g. reviews, s42 enquiries, s117 reviews, carer’s assessments (with agreement by manager’s)
• Support to design the Access system and route to the service giving feedback and ideas as appropriate. This will include completing the Access worker daily log of the different individual tasks carried out on Access, each day.

You will be line managed by an Adult Mental Health Social Work manager but will also have access to the other Social Work managers for any managerial advice/guidance.  For office working days you may select the office most convenient to you: Union House in Cambridge, Newtown Centre in Huntingdon or Agenoria House in Wisbech providing access to social work colleagues and staff facilities.

About you

We're looking for confident and dynamic individuals who enjoy making a difference in their local community, are curious and spot things that others might not see, enjoy building relationships and like to explore possibilities.  

We would expect you to have some mental health experience. The individual will need to be autonomous and be fairly confident in making decisions independently or proactive in seeking advice/guidance from colleagues/managers if need be. You will need to be confident in communicating decisions to colleagues and other professionals. The main bulk of the work consists of short term pieces of work so would suit somebody who enjoys working with these types of cases.

You must:

• Be a qualified Social Worker with a Social Work England registration
• Have the ability to work from a variety of locations and travel countywide independently

For a full list of the requirements of the role, please check out the Job Description and Person Specification.

About us

Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes.

Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do.

We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities. If you don’t meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don’t be put off.   We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered.  We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager, whose details can be found in the advert, to discuss any adjustment needs. Some examples of adjustments could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size and line spacing. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us and thrive, so if there is something that would help you to do your best during your journey with us, please get in touch.

Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion. 

https://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/council/jobs-and-careers