Job summary
- Main area
- Psychology
- Grade
- Band 8a
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week
- Job ref
- 350-SC7192140
- Employer
- Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Alexander House
- Town
- Leyland
- Salary
- £53,755 - £60,504 per annum
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 29/05/2025 23:59
Employer heading
Registered Practitioner Psychologist
Band 8a
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Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust celebrates diversity and promotes equal opportunities; we are committed to challenging and eliminating racism and other forms of discrimination and advancing and promoting equality of opportunity in the provision of services and creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe that everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect.
We take positive action to support disadvantaged groups and also particularly encourage applications from ethnically diverse, disabled and LGBTQIA+ people that are under-represented in our workforce. Furthermore we welcome applications from reservists and ex-armed forces personnel as we recognise the benefits of the values, skills, training and experience that they bring to their work with us. We encourage all applicants to share their equality information with us.
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Job overview
We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic and committed Band 8a Psychologist to join the Community Forensic Learning Disability Service (CFLDS). The service covers the Lancashire and South Cumbria footprint with an office/base in Leyland. We support people with learning disabilities (LD) who have complex needs associated with challenging or offending behaviour.
This is an exciting opportunity to support the transition of individuals with a Learning disability (LD) moving out of secure settings into the community. Also working to support individuals in the community to prevent admission to secure settings.
The successful applicant would join a well-established and friendly team to provide evidence-based interventions to service users with LD who maybe experiencing complex mental health issues; have trauma histories; ASC/ADHD diagnoses in addition to offending/risky behaviours. This post would suit someone with a keen interest in providing direct clinical input as well as working with wider systems (e.g., family and carers) and multidisciplinary and multi-agency working.
Main duties of the job
1. Provide specialist psychological assessments of service users based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources.
2. To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a patient’s psychological problems.
3. To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, and groups, within and across teams.
4. To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account relevant theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical, developmental and systemic processes that have shaped the individual, family or group. To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of service users whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans. To provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals and/or carers
5. To ensure that all members of the clinical team have access to a psychologically based framework for understanding and care of service users.
6. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual service users and to provide both general and specialist advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.
Working for our organisation
Mersey Care is one of the largest trusts providing physical health and mental health services in the North West, serving more than 1.4 million people across our region and are also commissioned for services that cover the North West, North Wales and the Midlands.
We offer specialist inpatient and community services that support physical and mental health and specialist inpatient mental health, learning disability, addiction and brain injury services. Mersey Care is one of only three trusts in the UK that offer high secure mental health facilities.
At the heart of all we do is our commitment to ‘perfect care’ – care that is safe, effective, positively experienced, timely, equitable and efficient. We support our staff to do the best job they can and work alongside service users, their families, and carers to design and develop future services together. We’re currently delivering a programme of organisational and service transformation to significantly improve the quality of the services we provide and safely reduce cost as we do so.
Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Teaching, Training and Supervision
1. To provide post-qualification training (CPD) and clinical professional supervision to recently qualified HCPC registered psychologists attached to the team, where appropriate.
2. To provide advice, consultation, training and clinical supervision to other members of the team for the provision of psychologically based interventions to help improve service users functioning.
3. To provide pre- and post-qualification teaching of psychologists and/or other psychological services staff, and other disciplines as appropriate.
4. To develop and maintain skills in the area of professional pre- and post-graduate training.
5. To provide advice, consultation and training to staff working with the service user group across a range of agencies and settings, where appropriate.
6. To receive regular professional supervision from a senior psychologist in the team and where appropriate other senior colleagues.
7. To continue to gain wider post-qualification experience of psychology in line with HCPC, and where appropriate BPS, requirements.
8. To provide professional and clinical supervision to assistant psychologists and, as appropriate, supervise Doctoral level.
9. To contribute to the pre and post-qualification teaching of all relevant staff, as appropriate.
Management, Recruitment and Service Development
1. To participate as appropriate in staff recruitment, both in the short-listing process and as a member of interview panels for assistant, trainees and qualified psychologists.
2. To participate as a senior clinician in the development of a high quality responsive and accessible service, including proposing and implementing changes within the psychological service.
3. To exercise delegated responsibility for managing psychology staff based within the psychology service.
Research and Service Evaluation
1. To contribute and where appropriate take a lead role, in the evaluation, monitoring and development of of service evaluation and audit
2. To Incorporate psychological frameworks for understanding and provision of high-quality care and the improvement of services for service users and their families.
3. To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence-based practice in individual work and work with other team members.
4. To undertake appropriate research as agreed with the line manager and Lead Consultant Clinical Psychologist and provide research advice to team colleagues undertaking research.
5. To undertake a defined role in Service Governance structures if/when agreed with the service lead.
General
1. To ensure the development, maintenance and dissemination of the highest professional standards of practice through active participation in internal and external CPD training and development programmes and to provide evidence of CPD undertaken, e.g. in the form of CPD log book.
2. To ensure the development and articulation of best practice in psychology within the service area and contribute across the service by exercising the skills of a reflective scientist practitioner, taking part in regular professional supervision and appraisal and maintaining an active engagement with current developments in the field of clinical or forensic psychology and related disciplines.
3. To maintain and promulgate the highest standards of clinical record keeping including electronic data entry and recording, report writing and the responsible exercise of professional self- governance in accordance with professional codes of practice of the HCPC, British Psychological Society and Trust policies and procedures.
4. To maintain up-to-date knowledge of legislation, national and local policies and issues in relation to both the specific service user group and area of care.
5. To perform other duties of a similar kind appropriate to the grade which may be required by the Lead Consultant Psychologist or Head of Service
6. To maintain professional registration with the HCPC and to adhere to HCPC standards of proficiency. To adhere to the standards of conduct, performance and ethics as set out by the HCPC.
7. To be competent and make full use of IT packages available within the work area, for example, Microsoft Office, E-mail, Internet and statistical package
Person specification
Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Doctoral level training (or equivalent) in a professional area of psychology conferring HCPC registration as a practitioner psychologist.
- Current HCPC registration
Desirable criteria
- Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice
- Chartered registration with the BPS
Knowledge/ Experience
Essential criteria
- Knowledge and skills development to meet factor 2 level 8 requirements.
- Demonstrated clinical experience of working as a registered psychologist with the service user group accessing the service in which this post is based
- Demonstrated experience working as part of a multi-disciplinary team and/or liaison with multidisciplinary clinicians and/or stakeholders.
- Demonstrated experience in undertaking specialist assessment, formulation, care planning and interventions.
- Experience of working with a wide variety of service user groups, experiencing complex needs and presenting problems.
- Experience of working with presenting problems that reflect the full range of clinical severity
- Experience of maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems,
Desirable criteria
- Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.
- Knowledge of organisational dynamics and institutional factors relevant to the delivery and effectiveness of secure inpatient mental health and PD services. Research/publications on relevant issues.
Values
Essential criteria
- Continuous Improvement
- Accountability
- Respectfulness
- Enthusiasm
- Support
- High professional standards
- Responsive to service users
- Engaging leadership style
- Strong customer service belief
- Transparency and honesty
- Discreet
- Change oriented
Skills
Essential criteria
- Well-developed skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment incorporating a range of methodologies, e.g. clinical interview, psychometrics, structured clinical tools.
- Well developed clinical intervention skills. Including at least one modality- specific clinical training to a standard eligible for accreditation
- Ability to assimilate complex information from a range of sources to complete psychological formulation and clinical risk assessment in order to develop effective treatment plans for service users with complex needs.
- Experience of delivering psychological intervention in a range of formats to service users with complex needs.
- Demonstrated ability to effectively engage service users who may present with significant clinical obstacles to engagement.
- Demonstrated ability to maintain clear and appropriate personal and professional boundaries and to recognise own limitations
- Well developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, highly technical and clinically sensitive information to service users, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
- Demsintrated Skills in providing consultation to other professional and non professional groups.
- Knowledge of research design and methodology, including complex multivariate data analysis as practised within the field of applied psychology
- Knowledge of legislation in relation to the service user group and area of service delivery.
- Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the HCPC/BPS.
- Evidence of recognised Formal training in supervision of other psychologists
- Well developed ability to utilise IT systems such as MS Office.
Desirable criteria
- Completion of training in specialist clinical and risk assessment tools in the area of specialisme.g. HCR-20, START, SCID, IPDE, PCL-R, WAIS, AIDOS.
- Well developed knowledge of the theory and practice of assessment and specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat populations relevant to the post.
- Previous training and experience of delivering a range of recognised specialised therapies e.g. CBT, DBT, Schema therapy
- Evidence of training and experience with regard to the development of Management and leadership skills.
Employer certification / accreditation badges
Applicant requirements
You must have appropriate UK professional registration.
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Rachael Clarkson
- Job title
- Consultant Clinical Psychologist
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Telephone number
- 01772 377960
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