Job overview

 An exciting new opportunity has arisen to recruit an 8b Principal Practitioner Psychologist across the Ardenleigh site, to provide additional leadership and specialist clinical input. This post offers a unique opportunity to contribute to the delivery of care for both young people and women, as well as lead on site wide developments and services.

The Ardenleigh site hosts two services. The Secure CAMHS (SCAMHS) service  and the Women’s Secure Blended Service (WSBS) 

 This post across Ardenleigh offers a substantial leadership role, working alongside the Consultant Clinical Psychologist, to provide leadership to the SCAMHS psychology team and represent psychology as part of the senior leadership team. You will also hold the team leader role for the site wide Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Team, overseeing the delivery of DBT across the site and ensuring the fidelity of the model. You will also contribute to site wide initiatives, such as delivering on Culture of Care, ensuring the continuation of Trauma Informed practice and other innovation projects. There will be an expectation to provide clinical work as well as consultation, supervision, reflective practice, and training for staff teams.

Main duties of the job

You will be joining a large and diverse psychological therapies team within the division, consisting of clinical and forensic psychologists, arts therapists, specialist psychological practitioners and assistant psychologists. Both services have a strong multi-disciplinary team ethos, in which psychology is well established and respected. The services are committed to providing the best care for women and young people, and as such service user involvement and co-production are central to what we do.  As a psychology team we also contribute significantly to the staff well-being strategy.

 We are committed to supporting our staff to have a positive experience of their time at work. We acknowledge that working across the Ardenleigh site can be challenging, so you will have access to a range of wellbeing support. As a division we are also committed to investing in staff and you will have opportunities for training, mentoring, supervision and career development.

It is essential that the successful candidate is a minimum of 5 days intensively DBT trained for them to take on the team leader role and preferably have additional training in this model. Leadership and service development experience is desirable, as well as managing and supervising a range of psychological professionals. The successful candidate will have extensive experience of working with service users with mental health presentations, psychological difficulties, neurodiversity and complex needs and risk.

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.