Job summary

Use your lived experience to make a difference.

We are looking for a compassionate and motivated Peer Support Worker to join our Community Mental Health Team.

This unique role uses your personal experience of mental health challenges and recovery to support others on their own journey. By sharing your experiences appropriately, you will help people build hope, confidence, and resilience while working towards the goals that matter to them.

As a Peer Support Worker, you will:

• Build positive and trusting relationships with service users.
• Provide emotional and practical support through shared lived experience.
• Encourage recovery, independence, and wellbeing.
• Help people access community resources, groups, and activities.
• Work alongside clinicians and other professionals as part of a supportive multidisciplinary team.

You will:

• Have lived experience of mental health difficulties and recovery.
• Be able to use your experiences safely and positively to support others.
• Have excellent communication and listening skills.
• Be passionate about recovery-focused and person-centred care.
• Enjoy working with people and helping them achieve their goals.

If you are passionate about supporting others and want to use your experience to inspire hope and recovery, we would love to hear from you.

At present, the Trust is unable to offer Skilled Worker visa sponsorship for this post. Applicants must have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will use their personal lived experiences of recovery from mental health challenges to offer empathy and understanding to others, inspiring hope and belief that recovery is possible. In this role, the peer worker will offer empathetic support alongside practical assistance in order to empower people to feel in control of their lives and their own unique recovery process. Within a relationship of mutuality and information sharing, they will promote choice, self-determination and opportunities for the fulfilment of socially valued roles and connection to local communities.

The peer support worker will act as a recovery champion within the team, and an ambassador for recovery for the Trust when working with external agencies and partner organisations. Peer workers will also be supported to continue their own personal and professional development as well as taking part in the ongoing development of peer roles in the Trust.

About us

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides joined-up mental and physical healthcare for around two million people across our communities. With over 13,000 staff working in the community and local hospitals, we deliver care at every stage of life, helping people live their best and healthiest lives.

Our mental health services include community-based support and early intervention in psychosis (EIP) for both adults and young people, alongside a network of specialist inpatient wards covering forensic, learning disability, eating disorder and older person's care.

We deliver extensive physical health services too, from urgent community response teams helping frail and older patients remain safely at home, to hospitals at home teams providing acute-level care in familiar surroundings. Our neurological services offer rehabilitation and treatment for conditions including Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's Disease, Motor Neurone Disease, Head Injury, Cerebral Palsy and Stroke. Across Hampshire, our community hospitals provide inpatient rehabilitation as a step down from acute care, and our dedicated teams also staff Treetops Sexual Assault Referral Centre in Portsmouth, offering expert, compassionate support.

Everything we do is underpinned by our CARE values of compassion, accountability, respect and excellence