Job overview

Oak is a 12 bedded Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit offering acute mental health care to adults. The ward provides male accommodation and has a multi-disciplinary team including drama therapist, occupational therapy, recreational workers as well as the nursing and medical team.

We are seeking Band 3 Health Care Assistants who have experience and who are passionate about providing the highest standards of mental health care in the acute inpatient setting. You will be expected to work as part of a team alongside with the qualified staff and focusing on needs of service users.

Main duties of the job

We are seeking enthusiastic, compassionate people who hold a strong belief in recovery for people with severe and enduring mental health problems. You will work alongside other members of the multi-disciplinary team and provide support to help meet the needs of service users, their carers and families. It is expected that you will be a flexible practitioner who enjoys new challenges in meeting the developing needs of the service and our service users.

Within the Trust and at Oak Unit, we believe strongly in supporting our staff and provide opportunities in individual as well as team development. There will be opportunities to develop and enhance your skills through supervision and training.

The area is well served with transport infrastructure to London and further afield. Hertfordshire is a diverse county offering cultural pursuits, market towns, beautiful countryside and historical sites.

If you are from a BAME background, we give you the opportunity to become part of the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) group and there are a number of Trust wide Staff Networks. 

Working for our organisation

Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (HPFT) is an outstanding organisation with ambitions to match. We are one of just five mental health trusts to achieve an overall rating of ‘Outstanding’ from the Care Quality Commission, and our aim is to be the leading provider of mental health and specialist learning disability services in the country.

Our family of over 3500 members of staff provide health and social care for over 400,000 people with mental ill health, physical ill health and learning disabilities across Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Norfolk, delivering these services within the community and several inpatient settings. We also deliver a range of nationally commissioned specialist services including Tier 4 services for children and young people, perinatal services, plus medium and low secure learning disabilities services.

The care we provide makes a fantastic difference to the lives of our service users, their families and carers - everything is underpinned by choice, independence and equality, with our Trust values embedded throughout:

Our Trust values are:

Welcoming. Kind. Positive. Respectful. Professional.

These values are at the core of who we are, everything we do, and how we do it!

Would you like to be part of the HPFT family? Would you like work with us to ensure our service users live the fullest lives possible they can? Would you like to be supported in your career to be the best that you can be?

Then please read on…