Job overview

Oxleas have an exciting opportunity within its Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Team to offer a 12 month fixed term maternity cover post.

We are seeking to recruit highly motivated Band 7 Clinical/Counselling Psychologists/Cognitive Behavioural Therapists (BABCP accredited) with an interest in perinatal mental health, to join our expanding and developing community specialist Perinatal Mental Health Team. We welcome applications from soon to be qualified applicants with relevant experience.

It is an exciting time to join the team as it is an innovative field for perinatal mental health. Our Perinatal team offers a unique opportunity to develop skills in both adult mental health and also to develop skills in parent infant and family work. It is an ideal opportunity for a Psychologist/CBT therapist with an interest in developing further specialist skills and experience and working within a multi-disciplinary community team.

As perinatal mental health is an expanding area of development, there is good potential for career development and training opportunities. There will be the opportunity to develop specialist competencies in evidence-based models (e.g. CBT, EMDR,) for individual therapy. 

In line with the long-term plan, the service is developing its interventions with couples, co-parents and piloting working with families up to 24 months. It is an exciting time to join our teams as each borough has recently been awarded national funding for the expansion of their services.

Main duties of the job

Main Clinical Duties

The main clinical work undertaken is to provide specialist psychological assessment and intervention for mothers and their babies and families in the community.

The post holder will be involved in delivering evidence-based individual and group-based interventions. The psychological therapies team include clinical and counselling psychologists, CBT therapists and a parent infant psychotherapist. The successful applicant will be part of a friendly and supportive team. There is an established reflective practice space for the whole team as well as regular individual supervision provided by the senior psychologist. Opportunities to develop supervision skills are consistently available and Oxleas has a longstanding relationship with clinical and counselling doctorate programs in taking trainees and developing the wider workforce.

About the team

The trust wide service is based at Queen Mary’s hospital and consists of a multidisciplinary team of professionals including consultant psychiatrists, specialist perinatal nurses, clinical psychologists, CBT therapists, nursery nurses and OTs. We offer a community service for pregnant and postnatal women with severe and complex mental health difficulties. 

Working for our organisation

Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.

We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.

Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families.  This is strengthened by our new values:

• We’re Kind
• We’re
• We Listen
• We Care