Job overview
As a Peer Support Worker within the rough sleepers/homelessness outreach team at Addiction Recovery Community Milton Keynes (ARC MK), 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 be street outreach using your personal insights to bring authenticity and connection to every interaction, engaging those hard to reach and completing comprehensive assessment of need and risk.
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 others, 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.
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, ARC MK 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 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
Within this role, the Peer Support Worker will build rapport and therapeutic alliance with those rough sleeping or at risk of homelessness to engage them into treatment and recovery journey. They will work in collaboration with the rough sleepers outreach team, 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.
1. To work in accordance with CNWL’s Trust Values, Aims and Objectives.
2. To act as an ambassador for the Trust with external agencies and partner organisations.
3. Work at all times to promote equality, diversity and individual human rights.
Be efficient, responsible and maintain a high level of personal organisation; keeping accurate and appropriate records and providing information for monitoring and evaluation as required
Vaccination
The successful applicant may have contact with patients or service users. As an NHS Trust we strongly encourage and support vaccination as this remains the best way to protect yourself, your family, your colleagues and of course patients and service users when working on our healthcare settings.
4. Due to the high response levels we receive for some vacancies, we may expire any of them prior to the advertised closing date and advise you to submit your application as soon as possible.
5. Applications from job seekers who require sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. Before submitting your application and to avoid disappointment please check that you are eligible under the
6. Our Agenda for Change employment contracts are subject to a contractual 13 week probationary period.