Specialist Parental Substance Misuse Social Worker

Co-located across Better Lives Adult Drug & Alcohol Treatment Services and Safeguarding and Family Support Provider Services, this post works in a multi-agency setting within Children’s Services and Islington’s Drug and Alcohol Treatment Services with the primary aims to:

• To provide a liaison (a ‘bridge’) between adult treatment services and children’s services within LB Islington. Support with communication (‘voice of the child’ within treatment services and the ‘voice of the using parent’ within children’s social care).
• To provide ongoing consultation, advice, training, coaching and joint interventions with the adult treatment staff on a regular basis and when required.
• Support children’s safeguarding discussions at the MDT meetings and advise the keyworker when a children’s safeguarding referral needs to be completed and sent to Childrens Social Care.
• Undertake joint home visits with Better Lives treatment staff to the homes of clients who are known to have children but are currently not open to children’ social care and consider threshold for referrals to early help, social work assessment, or for a Better Lives Family service referral.
• Join with the Better Lives treatment worker (where needed) to inform clients about decisions to make children’s services referrals.
• Lead on the development of Children’s Social Care pathways of safe care and support for children of Parental substance users, with the aim of promoting and improving the health and wellbeing of these children and young people.
• Delivery of expert advice, consultation and non-line-management guidance to case holding Children’s Social Care practitioners and Adult Treatment practitioners working with parents and carers with problematic substance use.
• Lead on the development and delivery of the assessment of the impact of parental substance use on parenting capacity and motivation towards sustainable change.
• Instruction as an expert witness within Public Law Outline (PLO) and undertake instructed PSM assessments in pre-proceedings and court proceedings.
• Compile instructed Parental Substance Misuse Impact reports for pre-proceedings and court proceedings and attend court in an expert witness capacity if called.
• Lead from Children’s Social Care on contributing to workforce development in Adult Treatment Services on the safeguarding of children in relationship to the impact of parental substance use, ensuring thresholds are clear and decision making is timely.
• Lead on good practice and be responsible for training Social Workers to undertake oral fluid swab drug testing and alcohol breathalyser testing and arrange hair strand testing, as well as providing consultations regarding test results and interpreting these.