Social worker opportunities in North Yorkshire – Health and Adult Services

A portrait of a man in a wheelchair next to a photograph of two men laughing outdoors.

Join our Health and Adult Service

We are looking to recruit to a variety of permanent roles including social workers, occupational therapists and team managers across a variety of locations within North Yorkshire.

We welcome application from both experienced candidates looking for their next challenge and those who are newly qualified.

All of our roles allow a flexible approach to working. Whilst work can be undertaken from your home base, there will be a requirement to attend the office on occasions due to service need. While virtual working is promoted as a modern and efficient way of delivering services, the need for face-to-face visits will also be required at times, depending on the needs and circumstances of the individual you are working with.

With part time hours and full time hours available, in a range of teams across North Yorkshire Council - there really is something for everyone!

Our teams across the council have worked, and are continuing to work, incredibly hard to deliver vital services in the face of unprecedented challenges.

The Covid-19 crisis led to a rapid change in our working practices across the whole of the health and care system and we are proud of the resilience and commitment our teams have shown to ensure that people in North Yorkshire continue to stay safe and well.

We thank our teams for their patience, professionalism, skills and flexibility and their willingness to go the extra mile.

We recognise that the wellbeing of our staff is of upmost importance and as a result we are looking to invest in our services, to ensure capacity, wellbeing of our staff and ability to work through the spike and backlog. We are looking to invest in greater resource longer term, to ensure we have well resourced, capable, well supported teams who have manageable workloads and are able to do their work well.

We are therefore looking to recruit to a range of unique opportunities across our Health and Adult services directorate- including social workers, occupational therapists and team managers.

Our current job opportunities

We currently have no vacancies.

Our health and adult services 2025 vision: Putting the pieces together

As we look forward we need to reflect, recover, respond and re-imagine.

In 2019, we started planning our health and adult services vision for the next five years. This began with Summer Conversations - 52 events with over 2,000 health and adult services colleagues across the county, to hear colleagues views on our priorities and to discuss the proposed three ambitious goals.

Although interrupted by the pandemic, work on the vision has continued. The health and adult services connected lunchtime sessions in May 2021 were dedicated to picking up the conversation about the vision in the context of the response to Covid-19 and new and emerging issues in public health and adult social care.

The main premise of this vision is that we reflect, recover, respond and re-imagine as a result of the pandemic.

As part of our latest vision, we have three ambitious goals:

opportunities for everyone, everywhere
my time and experiences are valued
my home, my community, my choice

In order to achieve our vision and ambitions, there are key values and behaviours that we require all of our teams and colleagues to display. These are:

collaborative
inclusive
confident
community minded
accountable
consistent

Opportunities within North Yorkshire Council

We are a high performing authority with a reputation for delivering high quality services. Proud of our successful track record as a leading care service provider, we consistently appear amongst the top performing county councils in the country, with over 97% of our inspected locations rated as 'Good'.

You would be joining us at a pivotal time for both North Yorkshire and the council's development, as we take forward our plans and work with partners to develop a distinctive public health and adult social care agenda.
Whilst Yorkshire is wonderfully diverse and with this comes great opportunity, variety and scale, it also brings complexities and key challenges. We strive to overcome these challenges.

Integration and working in partnership are key to overcoming some of the challenges and delivering high quality care services in the most effective way.

You can find out more about adult social care in this video about Make Care Matter.

Newly qualified

We support the Assessed and Supported Year of Employment programme for newly qualified social workers where you will be supported in your first full year of employment through reduced caseloads and enhanced supervision. Ensuring this supportive environment involves both peer support groups and link working with other professionals.

Hear what some of our newly qualified social workers said about our Assessed and Supported Year of Employment programme:

"I had the most outstanding support from start to finish, everyone involved could not support me enough".

"The support was excellent. I always got a fast answer. When I needed support in regards to my concerns about how long it was taking to get final reports, they supported me appropriately to enable completion".

A man smiling in front of a view of North Yorkshire.

Working for us - what we can offer you

We know adult social care can be a challenging profession. So it is important to us that our social workers have manageable workloads, supportive and transparent management and the opportunity for continuous professional development.

As an organisation, we promote a safe culture of support and learning which we expect all staff to endorse. We recognise the importance of the health and wellbeing of our employees, striving to ensure our staff have manageable case workloads and providing them with specialised administrative support, allowing focus on delivery of care services.

With this flexibility in mind, we encourage people to apply who might wish to work more flexibly or alternative hours, for example, only weekends.

Virtual induction programme

We have recently developed a virtual induction framework to provide our new starters with support and reassurance, to coordinate meaningful learning activities and to help the new starters competently fulfil their role.

Hear what some of our new starters have said about our virtual induction programme:

"To be able to feedback with existing cases and apply knowledge learnt from induction. To also be able to query anything that I was not sure of. Being able to reflect".

"It gave me a better understanding of the whole organisation, and did not just concentrate on my role. I also felt that having this knowledge around what departments / teams do has further reinforced my understanding of what is available to each service user".

Continuous professional development

We have a county wide team of senior practitioners with expertise in safeguarding, occupational therapy and social work. This team offer direct practice support for staff, which includes facilitating regular peer practice meetings and continued professional development sessions which are topic specific. These sessions aim to support learning in a relaxed and informal environment, promoting engagement and shared ideas.

In addition to this our staff are able to access our newly developed practice library.

The library will be maintained by the health and adult services practice team giving you an opportunity to stay up to date with current guidance, work on your continuing professional development and quickly find the information you need to continue delivering confident and consistent practice for North Yorkshire.

Flexible working arrangements and staying connected

Whilst work can be undertaken from your home base, there will be a requirement to attend the office on occasions due to service need. While virtual working is promoted as a modern and efficient way of delivering services, the need for face-to-face visits will also be required at times, depending on the needs and circumstances of the individual you are working with.

North Yorkshire is a modern council with new technology including IT equipment, WiFi access across council buildings, remote access and Microsoft Teams – all enabling and supporting flexible working and allowing our teams to connect across a large and complex geography. Some of our roles can be carried out completely remotely, where others have adopted a hybrid approach with a blend of home working, office working and community based working.

Since Covid, we have developed new ways of keeping connected across our teams. Health and adult services connected was introduced as part of the Covid response but weekly meetings still continue. Colleagues have fed back that the leadership have been extremely visible and we have remained connected with each other and the wider organisation through Yammer, a social networking platform that allows staff members to connect and engage with each other in virtual communities.

As wider organisation some teams have had virtual tea / coffee catch up, start and end of the day check ins and after work social activities such as quizzes, competitions and afternoon teas.

Living and working in North Yorkshire

North Yorkshire is a thriving county, which is a special place for everyone to live, work and visit.

It is a stunning place with happy and safe communities, and excellent education. Over the past two years, the new national crime figures have revealed that the region has some of lowest crimes rates in the country. It is rich in history and culture, in a backdrop of outstanding natural beauty, vibrant cities, market towns, quaint villages, stunning rural and coast landscapes. We can also boast having three towns in the top ten of the UK Halifax quality of life survey.

In addition, the county benefits from excellent road and rail links, with easy access via the east coast mainline, the A1(M) and A19. Leeds, York, Newcastle, Durham and Teesside are all easily commutable, and London and Edinburgh are just two hours away by train.

As a whole North Yorkshire offers a high standard of living working in a stunning location as well as great employment opportunities for your family members along with a higher proportion of schools, which are good or outstanding compared to national figures.

Looking to relocate? We welcome applications from those looking to relocate to North Yorkshire, with a relocation allowance available. For more information please see our relocation policy.

You can find out more about what North Yorkshire has to offer on the No place like North Yorkshire website.

Application tips

See our advice on making your application.