Mental Health Nurse at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

The job at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Mental health nurses support and promote recovery for people experiencing a wide range of mental health conditions, from medication management to recommending therapies and structured social activities. They build trusting relationships quickly and are trained to identify the risk of self-harm or harm to others, working closely with GPs, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists. Mental health nurses practise across psychiatric wards, specialist units and community settings, including clients' own homes. People experiencing a wide range of mental health conditions, across inpatient, specialist and community settings.

At a mental health trust such as Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, that work means a mental health caseload across inpatient units, community mental health teams, crisis services and, in most organisations, child and adolescent and secure services. Rotations here tend to move between inpatient and community teams rather than between body systems, and supervision arrangements matter more than in almost any other setting. Across the profession as a whole, mental health nurses work in settings including psychiatric wards, specialist mental health units, community mental health teams and clients' homes — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £32,073 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.

This page states no figure specific to Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust because none is published in the open data. When the workforce and staff survey feeds include this organisation, the establishment size, the response rate and the theme scores will appear above.