VCS Jobs

Overview – Justlife Brighton
The team provide holistic, responsive and flexible support to people with the aim of helping their experience of housing vulnerability be as short, safe and healthy as possible. This includes health engagement work improving access to primary care, helping clients improve and maintain their health along with support specifically for those in temporary accommodation in the city. Justlife also engages in research into the effects of living in temporary accommodation, which informs our work locally, as well as enabling us to have conversations on a wider scale to bring about positive change.

Job Summary – Health Engagement Worker The role of Health Engagement Worker will involve supporting a caseload of people that are experiencing homelessness. The role requires the use of specialist knowledge and relationship skills to influence people with varying degrees of mental health, addiction and trauma related issues to engage with health services. This will include advocacy in registering them for medical services and accompanying them to appointments; assisting them in addressing all aspects of physical and mental health or substance addiction needs, as well as advocating or them to get access to source housing and social security benefits. Working collaboratively with our partners Arch Healthcare the role is dependent on good communication and joint working with a variety of partners and professionals.

The role requires a high degree of motivation to support complex and vulnerable people, often in a lone-working situation. With a passion to work collaboratively with others for the good of our service users, and with some experience of working in a related field in a voluntary or paid capacity.

A high degree of emotional intelligence is required to support people, many of whom have complex emotional needs, with backgrounds of trauma, neglect, abuse, crime and low self-worth. A role of this nature will experience a range of emotions from joy to grief and as such requires a high degree of resilience to cope with the emotional demands of the role.

Making decisions “in the moment” to do the right thing to mitigate risk with service users can place high emotional demands on the job holder. The role is highly reactive, unpredictable and at times, chaotic. The role therefore requires a high degree of self-awareness to one’s own resilience levels and exercising appropriate levels of self-care.