Healthcare Support Worker
Choosing to be a healthcare support worker at Leeds and York Partnership Foundation Trust, providing vital support to patients and staff.
As a healthcare support worker, you will be caring for our service users and supporting the nurses, doctors, and other team members in providing the quality care required. As a specialist in mental health and learning disabilities, we cover a range of specialities. We provide learning and teaching opportunities leading to the development and progression of your career in the NHS.
Healthcare support workers positively impact people’s lives. This pathway in the NHS is a person-centred role, and it involves forming professional relationships with our service users, focusing on supporting their personal and mental well-being and improving their lives.
Your role as a healthcare support worker
We’re searching for people with a passion for supporting their community.
As a leading provider of mental health and learning disability services in the country, being a support worker here at Leeds and York Partnership Foundation Trust means you’d be part of something bigger. Supporting adults across Leeds with a dedicated team of people who only want the best for those they care for.
What is a support worker?
The people who use our service have staff to support them to live in their own homes due to the complexity of their learning disabilities and other needs. Having a set support team helps the continuity of care and the development of trust, rapport, and understanding and helps people feel settled in their own homes.
We develop support packages with the people we support. These hold a range of information about who someone is and how we work with them. Supported living is to enable people to live as independently as possible. Support staff are present to promote autonomy and choice and provide direct care and support. Supporting people to do as much as possible for themselves is an important principle. Staff should always seek to do things with, rather than for, people.
As a service, we use person-centred approaches to offer people the support that is right for them as individuals – which sometimes means we have to make decisions that are in people’s best interests which they might not always agree with.
What does a support worker do?
Our support workers help with personal care such as bathing and domestic tasks, like cooking and cleaning, and support with leisure activities like shopping, travelling, and socialising.
The relationship between staff and the people we support should be therapeutic and caring, focusing on meeting the person’s needs. The aim of the relationship should be to promote autonomy, independence, choice and control. The role of the support staff should be to help people reach their potential. Our team establishes a rapport with the people they support, which can develop into a befriending role that helps build trust and a professional relationship to meet the needs of the people they support.
Richard is a Support Manager in our Specialised Supported Living Service. He started when he was 21 years old as a support worker. Richard went from working in a call centre to now being a Support Manager in the Trust.
