The Lead Advanced Lived Experience Practitioner will provide senior borough-wide lived experience leadership across Westminster services, including adult mental health, older adults, crisis pathways and associated interfaces.
The post holder will act as a single point of accountability for co-production, patient and carer involvement, Expert by Experience coordination and local lived experience workforce development and governance.
The role will support and lead the development and ongoing delivery of CNWL’s peer support and lived experience practice offer within Westminster, ensuring lived experience roles are implemented in line with trust-wide principles, staff are appropriately supported, and involvement activity is safe, structured and impactful.
The post holder will embed lived experience into decision-making, quality improvement and service development; establish and sustain patient involvement forums and carer spaces; support recruitment, induction and supervision arrangements for peer and lived experience roles; and contribute to Trust priorities including PCREF, trauma-informed approaches, ACE accreditation, the psychosocial vision and recovery-focused practice
- Promote understanding of the purpose, principles and value of peer support and lived experience practice across Westminster services, including adult mental health, older adults, crisis pathways and relevant inpatient and community interfaces.
- Act as the borough-wide lead for co-production and lived experience practice, ensuring lived experience is included early and meaningfully in service design, pathway development, quality improvement and transformation work.
- Contribute to Westminster senior management, quality, transformation and other governance meetings so that lived experience perspectives inform operational and strategic decision-making.
- Develop, implement and review a borough-wide lived experience and co-production work plan for Westminster, aligned to local priorities and Trust-wide lived experience strategy.
- Provide visible leadership that helps create cultures that are recovery-oriented, relational, inclusive, psychologically safe and responsive to service users, carers and communities.
- Work collaboratively with central lived experience colleagues and contribute to Trust-wide lived experience leadership workstreams,
- Contribute to service development meetings across Westminster and propose service or policy changes that improve accessibility, inclusion, recovery-focused practice and service user experience.
CNWL provides NHS services throughout a person’s life, in physical and mental health and everything in between, from GPs and hospitals to the community and in their own home.
Where community care is not possible, we offer several facilities to treat people in hospital or residential environments. We also provide healthcare in prisons in London and the surrounding areas.
Please note: This vacancy does not meet the criteria for Skilled Worker sponsorship, unless you meet the criteria by temporary exemption from current changes to immigration rules put in force on 22/07/2025. “Separate provisions are applied to workers who have been sponsored and held continuously Skilled Worker visa since prior to 04/04/2024."
As such, if you don’t meet the Transitional Provision (above) we are unable to consider your application unless you can provide documentary evidence of your right to work in the United Kingdom. If you believe you are eligible for sponsorship or already hold a valid right to work in the UK, please ensure you provide full details of your immigration status in the Pre-Screening Immigration section of your application form.
Please note role eligibility also depends on whether the role meets the salary threshold for the relevant occupational code (SOC CODE).
For further info please visit: Skilled Worker visa: Overview - GOV.UK
Lived Experience Specialist Work
- Establish, facilitate and maintain patient involvement forums and carer spaces across Westminster, ensuring they are psychologically safe, well-structured and linked to clear “you said, we did” feedback loops.
- Coordinate and support Expert by Experience involvement in partnership with local involvement structures, ensuring appropriate preparation, briefing, debriefing, support, supervision and safeguarding.
- Ensure involvement activity is meaningful, equitable and linked to real service change rather than tokenistic or one-off consultation.
- Build and maintain relationships with VCSE partners, community organisations, local authority, primary care and other system partners to strengthen community connection, co-production and social inclusion.
- Support the development of culturally responsive and trauma-informed involvement approaches that reflect Westminster’s diversity and help address inequity and exclusion.
- Use lived experience in a boundaried, purposeful and professionally accountable way to support individuals, teams and service development.
- Deliver occasional specialist lived experience-based interventions, groups or workshops where appropriate. This may include co-producing recovery planning, crisis planning, advanced statements, personal network maps, psychoeducation or peer-informed sessions.
- Provide person-centred, strengths-based and trauma-informed support, informed by lived experience, to help service users maintain or regain agency, hope and autonomy in their contact with services.
- Advocate for the perspectives of service users and carers within MDTs and other professional forums, helping teams to consider different viewpoints, worldviews and options.
- Work effectively in highly sensitive and complex situations, including where people may be experiencing significant distress, trauma, exclusion or mistrust of services.
- Maintain accurate, timely and high-quality records using appropriate Trust systems and governance processes.
- Work at all times in accordance with safeguarding, confidentiality, information governance, professional boundaries and clinical governance requirements.
- Identify themes, risks, gaps and opportunities arising from service user, carer and staff feedback, and translate these into recommendations, actions and escalation where required.
- Develop light-touch but robust systems for reporting activity, themes, impact and outcomes relating to lived experience workforce development, involvement activity, forums and co-produced change.
- Contribute to local and Trust-wide audit, evaluation, quality improvement and evidence gathering in relation to peer support, lived experience practice and co-production.
- Support Westminster services to evidence progress against relevant Trust priorities, including PCREF, trauma-informed approaches, ACE accreditation and the psychosocial and recovery vision.
- Contribute to reports, presentations, case studies, publications and learning events within CNWL and with external partners where appropriate.
Use data, feedback and learning to support continuous improvement and to demonstrate the quality, value and impact of lived experience practice.
