Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust
Peer Support Worker
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Job Overview
As a Peer Support Worker at Addiction Recovery Community Hillingdon (ARCH), you’ll be a vital part of a passionate and multi-disciplinary team. Your lived experience of recovery won’t just be welcomed — it will be celebrated as a powerful tool for change. You’ll offer practical support, empathy, and hope to individuals using the service, helping them take back control and shape their own unique recovery journeys.
In this role, you’ll work closely with professionals such as Psychologists, Advanced Lived Experience Practitioners, and the Lead Group Facilitator, supporting service users both one-to-one and in groups. You’ll have opportunities to co-work with colleagues and contribute to the development of peer-led, trauma-informed, and inclusive care. A key part of your work will include creating and facilitating group sessions, using your personal insights to bring authenticity and connection to every interaction.
At CNWL, we’re committed to offering high-quality, evidence-based support while fostering a culture of learning, reflection, and innovation. We have strong academic links with institutions like Imperial College, University College London, and we’re always evolving through clinical governance, audit, and research. As a Peer Support Worker, your contributions will be valued not just by the people you support — but by the entire organisation.
This is more than just a role — it’s a chance to use your journey to inspire recovery, build community, and create meaningful change.
Within this role, the Peer Support Worker will contribute to group interventions in collaboration with the RDP and Group Facilitator, drawing on their unique lived experience to offer meaningful support to our service users. They will also have the opportunity to develop and lead their own peer support groups, bringing creativity and personal insight into their practice.
Main duties of the job
Main Duties of the role:
- To work as part of the multi-disciplinary team in order to deliver support to individuals in the RDP, ARCH and the Addictions directorate, and supporting the interventions used in these services.
- To use personal, experiential knowledge and to share lived experience, as appropriate to the peer role, in building safe, trusting relationships with named service users.
- To assume a ‘coaching’ role supporting service users in developing personal recovery tools; this can be delivered individually or in groups.
- To empower and enable each individual service user, in a non-directive, non-prescriptive way, to discover and make use of their own strengths and to build and strengthen positive connections with their peers, networks and wider communities.
- To use personal experience of recovery to help motivate service users and act as a role model to service users to inspire hope, share life experiences and lessons learned as a person in recovery.
- To provide opportunities for service users to direct their own recovery process and support service users in identifying and overcoming fears within a relationship of empathy and trust.
Working for our organisation
Values
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Central and North West London NHS Trust expects the Advanced Lived Experience Practitioner to act in a way that shows an understanding of our core values. and is active in putting them into practice with service users, their friends, family, carers and also other staff members.
- Compassion: contribution to a caring and kind environment and recognition that what you do and say can help to improve the lives of others.
- Respect: acknowledge, respect and value diversity of each individual, recognition of uniqueness.
- Empowerment: commitment to providing information, resources and support to help others make their own decisions and meet their own needs. The Trust endeavours to support all staff to enable them to develop and grow.
- Partnership: work closely with others and behave in a way that demonstrates understanding that commissioners and users of our services are the people who generate and fund our work.
Detailed Job Description And Main Responsibilities
Main Duties of the role:
- To work as part of the multi-disciplinary team in order to deliver support to individuals in ARCH Hillingdon and the Addictions directorate, and support the interventions used in these services.
- To use personal, experiential knowledge and to share lived experience, as appropriate to the peer role, in building safe, trusting relationships with named service users.
- To assume a ‘coaching’ role supporting service users in developing personal recovery tools; this can be delivered individually or in groups.
- To empower and enable each individual service user, in a non-directive, non-prescriptive way, to discover and make use of their own strengths and to build and strengthen positive connections with their peers, networks and wider communities.
- To use personal experience of recovery to help motivate service users and act as a role model to service users to inspire hope, share life experiences and lessons learned as a person in recovery.
Service Development and Delivery
- To provide consultation and training to other teams as appropriate.
- To maintain up to date knowledge of legislation, national and local policies and issues in relation to both the specific service user group, peer support and substance use.
- To comply with all relevant Trust policies, procedures and guidelines, including those relating to Equal Opportunities, Health and Safety and Confidentiality of Information and to be aware of any changes in these.
Please note: This vacancy does not meet the criteria for Skilled Worker sponsorship, unless you meet the criteria by temporary exemption from current changes to immigration rules put in force on 22/07/2025. “Separate provisions are applied to workers who have been sponsored and continuously held a Skilled Worker visa since prior to 04/04/2024."
As such, if you don’t meet the Transitional Provision (above) we are unable to consider your application unless you can provide documentary evidence of your right to work in the United Kingdom. If you believe you are eligible for sponsorship or already hold a valid right to work in the UK, please ensure you provide full details of your immigration status in the Pre-Screening Immigration section of your application form.
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Please note role eligibility also depends on whether the role meets the salary threshold for the relevant occupational code (SOC CODE).
For further info please visit: Skilled Worker visa: Overview - GOV.UK
Person specification
Other
Essential criteria
- A preparedness to work flexible hours through prior arrangement as the needs of the job dictate (e.g. some evenings & weekends)
Education And Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Commitment to obtain underpinning knowledge through work based learning and mandatory training, (including accredited peer support worker training if not previously undertaken)
- Completion of accredited peer support training, or willingness to undertake Level 4 City University-accredited “Developing Expertise in Peer Support” course
Desirable criteria
- Accredited certificate in Life Coaching
- Completion of courses that are DANOS compliant
- Evidence of further training in relation to personal recovery principles
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE (Paid/unpaid Relevant) To The Job
Essential criteria
- Lived experience of substance misuse problems, with 12 months abstinence from dependent & problematic drug & alcohol use; including prescribed opiate substitutes
- Willing to positively share your own life experiences and personal experience of substance misuse with service users and carers
- Experience of having developed plans for managing own recovery
Desirable criteria
- Delivery of Recovery College courses or equivalent
Skills, Knowledge, Abilities
Essential criteria
- Ability to demonstrate first person experiential knowledge of personal recovery
- Ability to demonstrate knowledge of personal recovery as it may relate to others
- Evidence of good interpersonal skills and an ability to form peer relationships with service users and carers
- Effective listening skills
- Ability to communicate on all levels and to a broad scope of individuals, both internally and externally to the Trust
- Ability to demonstrate empathy, compassion and patience
- An ability to be non judgemental
- An ability to act calmly and to respond in a professional manner to distress, disturbance and unpredictability
- Ability to problem solve and create innovative solutions to help empower service users
- Understanding of issues arising from experiencing ill health related to substance use
- Ability to work unsupervised in a range of settings
- Sensitive understanding of diversity issues and an ability to promote antidiscriminatory practice/ equal opportunities
- Good organisational skills
- Effective team player
Desirable criteria
- Knowledge of basic first aid
- Basic Health and Safety awareness
- Moving and handling awareness
- Awareness of local services
- Knowledge of benefits/ employment systems
- Ability to speak other languages
- Ability to demonstrate a good understanding of substance misuse issues
- Working knowledge of the principles of coproduction
- Interviewing skills
- Knowledge of policies
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