Advanced Practitioner Physiotherapist in Inpatient Paediatrics

Job overview

An exciting and rare opportunity has arisen for an enthusiastic and well-motivated individual to join the Paediatric Therapy team at Leicester Royal Infirmary as an Advanced Physiotherapy Practitioner. A key feature of this role will be to provide inspirational clinical leadership to the inpatient paediatric team alongside expert patient care for respiratory inpatients including critical care.

The successful candidate will work in partnership with the Paediatric Physiotherapy team and the Children's Hospital multi-disciplinary team. They will have a pivotal role in ensuring excellent patient care across the Paediatric and Cardiac Intensive Care Units and paediatric base wards collaborating in service development.

The post holder will be responsible for the organisation, strategic planning, coordination, delivery, evaluation and standards of practice for Inpatient Paediatric Physiotherapy at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust alongside the Specialty Lead, with a particular focus on respiratory care. It is an exciting time for the team following a successful business case securing new roles for inpatient paediatrics at UHL.

The role offers the opportunity for physiotherapists with extensive experience in this area to grow their personal and professional development with both breadth and depth across a framework of clinical practice, education, leadership, and quality improvement and research.

This post is fulltime, but part-time considered for the right candidate.

Main duties of the job

The UHL Therapy service provides key therapeutic assessments, treatment recommendations and interventions to patients in order to promote health and independence and facilitate optimum function for patients.

The post holder will be accountable for the delivery of high quality paediatric physiotherapy care with focus on respiratory and critical care, but with oversight of the entire Inpatient Paediatric Therapy service, comprising of physiotherapy and occupational therapy.

Be responsible for providing expert clinical practice with advanced clinical reasoning and support to staff and provide clinical leadership to further develop staff

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Lead the implementation of service improvements and integration of services within Paediatric Inpatient Physiotherapy in conjunction with the Therapy Speciality Lead and Therapy Head of Service, with particular focus towards Respiratory and Critical Care.
• They will coordinate a specialist team providing a comprehensive physiotherapy service to patients referred to the Paediatric Inpatient Physiotherapy service.
• Act as an advanced, autonomous practitioner to provide specialist therapy assessments, diagnose and develop individualised treatment programmes based on patients’ needs, using advanced clinical reasoning skills and to develop own area of clinical practice within a specialty area.
• Be responsible for delivering high quality specialist therapy to patients within Inpatient Paediatrics, with particular focus towards Respiratory and Critical Care.
• In addition to managing their own patient caseload they will take a leading role in the physiotherapy management of patients across the specialty, who have complex needs and multi-pathologies
• Act as a clinical lead for physiotherapy within Inpatient Paediatrics ensuring continued development and maintenance of clinical skills in line with current evidence base
• Work in collaboration with consultant intensivists to provide advanced knowledge from an advanced clinical specialist perspective
• Provide clinical supervision to the Inpatient Paediatric Clinical Specialist Physiotherapists
• Participate in on-call and emergency duties where they will work independently to manage the respiratory needs of complex critically ill patients
• Demonstrate autonomy to make complex decisions