Job overview

An opportunity has arisen for a motivated Assistant Psychologist to work at the National Deaf Mental Health Service, Birmingham. The post will involve assessing changes in language and cognition of deaf people with mental health difficulties and providing psychological intervention to aid recovery. The applicant will be a psychology graduate with sign language experience and someone willing to work closely with the wider multidisciplinary team.

The service operates from The Barberry. We provide specialist mental health services for deaf people across a third of England via a 12 bedded mixed inpatient ward and community team. We work directly with clients who have severe and enduring mental health problems and co-work with their local mental health teams. Some of our services users have concurrent learning disabilities and/or language deprivation.

The applicant would be supervised by an experienced clinical psychologist and be a member of a small subgroup of psychologists. However, we pride ourselves on our multidisciplinary working and much of the assistant psychologist's work will involve engaging other professionals, both deaf and hearing.

Our service works closely with other national and international deaf mental health care providers and values the sharing of evidenced based practice.

It is our hope that the successful candidate for the assistant psychologist post will have a future in clinical psychology and a long term interest in deaf mental health care.

Main duties of the job

Under the supervision of a qualified and suitably experienced psychologist:

• To facilitate group and individual interventions to service users within both inpatient and community settings.
• To attend clinical reviews and other multi-disciplinary meetings, where appropriate.
• To promote the use of British Sign Language and the inclusion of Deaf staff in all aspects of service delivery.
• To assist in making clinical observations of service users.
• To design, plan, run and write up research projects within the service focusing on the use of BSL in a clinical context.
• To disseminate the results of this work through training, presentations at conferences and publication of research papers in peer reviewed journals.
• To undertake specific duties, as identified, relating to service governance objectives including planning, data collection, analysis and report writing. This will require the substantive use of IT equipment and software.
• To attend individual supervision with a Clinical Psychologist.
• To undertake personal appraisal and continuing professional development activities as agreed with the relevant line manager including general training as mandatory within the policies and procedures of the Trust.
• To liaise with professional colleagues, operational managers, referral agencies, affiliated organisations and academic departments as relevant to this post.

Working for our organisation

Welcome to Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.  Our 4000 clinical and support staff help us to improve mental health wellbeing and meet the needs of the 70,000 people we serve each year.  We provide a range of mental healthcare services across Birmingham and Solihull, as well as specialised services nationally. We also offer medical, nursing and psychology training and are proud of our international reputation for both research and innovation.

Our population is culturally diverse, characterised in places by high levels of deprivation which create an increasing demand for our services and a necessity for us to make sure everyone can access the help they need. We are a team of compassionate, inclusive and committed people working together to provide excellent care to support our community.  If you are looking for a place to belong, where you can make a real difference to people’s lives, join our team where our warm welcome is waiting for you.