Occupational Therapy Lead - Community

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced Occupational Therapist to join our teams across the community hospitals.

This post provides operational and clinical line management for Therapists, Assistant Practitioners and support staff at Aldeburgh and Felixstowe community hospitals, whilst also providing professional supervision for occupational therapists at Bluebird Lodge and Avocet Court. You role will ensure therapy services across the community bedded units are delivering high quality, patient focused care and rehabilitation supporting safe and timely discharge.

You will be part of an experienced multidisciplinary team consisting of Nurses, Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, Social Care and clinical support staff. You will work closely with your physiotherapist counterpart to manage staffing across the 4 community bedded sites, and will have the opportunity to be involved with local and service wide clinical development and innovation projects.

The successful candidate will have outstanding communication and leadership skills. You should be self-motivated, have highly developed clinical expertise, be flexible to meet the needs of your patients and service. This is a chance to work within an established supportive and dynamic multidisciplinary team, where personal clinical development is strongly encouraged and supported.

Please note, a full driving licence is essential as this role requires cross site working, including in rural areas.

To be professionally and legally responsible for all aspects of the role including patients in the jobholder’s care. To provide visible leadership to the multidisciplinary team on a day to day basis. To support all members of the MDT with complex professional discussions with patients/relatives/staff. To be responsible to completion of incident investigations and lead on serious incident investigations when required to do so To take a lead role in authorising specialist equipment. To undertake highly specialised therapy assessments for a wide variety of conditions to establish impairments and disabilities. This will include physical, cognitive, social and environmental assessment, using standardised and/or validated assessment tools where appropriate, in order to facilitate early discharge where possible. To liaise as appropriate with members of the MDT those patients who require specialist assessment. To be aware of the contra-indications to assessment/treatment in patients and identify when it is safe/ unsafe to initiate intervention. To use advanced communication skills to agree therapy goals with individual patients using previous experience to ensure goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and appropriately timed. To monitor and evaluate treatment to measure progress and ensure effectiveness of the intervention to identify quickly when treatment requires modifying.