NHS Individual Placement and Support Cheshire & Wirral
For Referral Partners
How does IPS work?
IPS is designed to support your work by ensuring service users enter and keep jobs that are conducive to recovery. Our Employment Specialists work in direct partnership with you to ensure support is comprehensive and tailored to the needs of each service user wanting to achieve paid employment. When you refer your service users to us, they’ll receive support to find paid work based on their goals and interests, and where required we negotiate hours, in-work support and working conditions with employers.
We work with you to ensure our services align with each service user’s existing treatment plan. This ensures that our interventions help service users to continue their recovery journey while in employment, reducing the likelihood of conditions relapsing or deteriorating.
Each of our Employment Specialist supports up to 25 service users at a time. These small caseloads mean our teams have the time to provide the tailored support needed for each service user. For the convenience of you and your service users we deliver on site in NHS sites and within the community. This means that we are easily accessible when you need us.
How we work with you:
Productive collaboration with our partners is core to Standguide’s service delivery. To support your team and service users we will:
- Make initial contact with service users within 3 working days of your referral
- Share information with you to keep you informed of service user progress
- Invite you into our sessions with service users if you wish, working around your availability
- Tailor our support to each individual’s needs, based on their goals and treatment plan
- Work with you to prevent disengagement from services
Our performance and quality:
In autumn 2022 our Cheshire NHS IPS service was assessed under the Fidelity Scale by IPS Grow, the national quality assurance body for IPS. We are delighted to have scored 119 out of a maximum 125 marks, graded as “Exemplary”. This was the highest score awarded to any organisation nationally. We also received the ‘Quality Mark’ for high performance across key criteria, including number of participants entering paid employment.
Our service has also been praised in The Big Book of Best Practice, page 33: Download it here:
What our clinical partners say*:
“We really do sing their praises”
“The Employment Specialist is distinctively good”
“They have slotted right into the team. They are flexible and respond quickly”
“It feels like the linking in is really easy… there are not lots of forms, you can just pick up the phone”
*Feedback from NHS Community Mental Health Teams, Early Intervention Teams and Senior Management: Standguide’s 2022 Cheshire IPS Fidelity Review
How to Refer:
If you work with somebody who you think could benefit from IPS to help them find or keep the right job for their mental health, then get in touch now.
Call 0333 240 8040 or textphone 18001 0161 881 4826 to refer someone to our provision, or email enquiries.IPS@standguide.co.uk for more information. Alternatively, enter their information below and we’ll contact them:
If you are a referral partner submitting this form on behalf of somebody you work with, by submitting this form you confirm that:
- The individual currently lives within Cheshire or the Wirral
- The individual has a diagnosed severe mental illness
- The individual is either unemployed or employed and at risk of losing their job
- The individual has given consent for you to share their contact details with the IPS team to contact them about this service.
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This service is commissioned by NHS Cheshire and Merseyside and delivered by Standguide Ltd. and Seetec.
