Job summary
- Main area
- Psychology
- Grade
- Band 8b
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week (Monday to Friday 9-5)
- Job ref
- 350-SC7197787
- Employer
- Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Alexander House
- Town
- Leyland
- Salary
- £62,215 - £72,293 per annum pro rata
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 10/06/2025 23:59
- Interview date
- 16/06/2025
Employer heading
Principal Clinical Psychologist
Band 8b
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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
The Community Forensic Learning Disability Service (CFLDS) 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. We are looking to recruit a motivated and enthusiastic psychologist who is passionate about providing psychological assessment, formulation and intervention to individuals with LD and their carers/family.
The successful applicant will take a lead role for the psychological provision within CFLDS. They will have a key role in supervising newly qualified clinical psychologists, assistant psychologists and clinical psychology trainees. The successful applicant will develop complex formulations, offer supervision, consultancy, training and multi-agency working.
All candidates must be registered with the HCPC, meet the travel requirements, and have an interest in forensic/learning disability populations.
Main duties of the job
Responsible for the systematic provision of high quality psychological assessment, intervention, and risk management for service users under the care of the Specialist Community Forensic Service. This is a senior clinical role within the team and the post holder will adopt a leadership role and provide support to the team manager. Provide formal and structured psychological consultations with members of the multi-disciplinary team to contribute to well developed psychologically informed risk management plans for individual service users
To participate as required in recruitment, line-management, professional appraisal, and the identification of CPD needs for designated psychological services staff working in wider rehabilitation service. To contribute to audit, policy and service development and research activities and/or programmes as required by the service. To propose and assist in implementing policy and service development changes. To bring psychological expertise to resolving complex clinical and operational issues faced by the service/team.
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
Clinical:
1. To provide highly developed specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the service, based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological (and neuropsychological) tests, self-report measures, rating scales direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with clients, family members and others involved in the client’s care.
2. To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s psychological problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy.
3. To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals/carers/families and/or groups employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting
and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
4. To make highly skilled evaluations and decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family or group.
5. To exercise full responsibility and autonomy for the psychological treatment of and discharge of clients whose problems are managed as a psychologically based care plan, ensuring appropriate assessment, formulation and interventions, communicating with the referral agent and others involved with the care on a regular basis.
6. To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals, contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan in an appropriate specialist area.
7. To ensure that all members of the clinical team have access to a psychologically based framework for the understanding and care of clients of the service, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological knowledge, research and theory in an appropriate specialist area.
8. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for relevant individual clients and to provide both general and specialist advice for the MDT, psychologists and other professionals on psychological aspects of risk assessment and management.
9. To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor and evaluate progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.
10. To provide expertise and advice to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of psychological care by all members of the treatment team.
11. To provide consultation about the psychological care of the client group to staff and agencies outside the Directorate and Trust in an appropriate specialist area.
Please see full Job Description attached.
Person specification
Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Post-graduate doctoral level training in clinical psychology accredited by the BPS, or its approved equivalent.
- Additional relevant clinical and/or managerial knowledge and skills acquired through formal training, long or short courses, formal supervision, structured self-study or experience (or a combination of these) to an appropriate level approved by the Head of service and demonstrated by certification, supervision & CPD logs, management appraisal documentation, and/or assessment at interview.
Desirable criteria
- Post-doctoral qualification in one or more additional specialized areas of psychological practice.
Knowledge/ Experience
Essential criteria
- Significant experience of working as a qualified clinical psychologist within specialist Mental Health services.
- Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups, across the whole life course and presenting with the full range of clinical severity across the full range of care settings including outpatient, community, primary care, inpatient and residential care settings including maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse and the threat of physical abuse.
- Experience of working with complex presentations.
- Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for clients’ psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care co-ordinator and also within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
- Experience of teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision
- Experience of leadership in mental health services (i.e. service development)
Desirable criteria
- Experience of representing the profession within the context of multi-professional care.
- Experience of providing consultation, supervision and training to multidisciplinary staff
- Experience of the application of psychology with people from different cultural contexts
Values
Essential criteria
- Continuous Improvement
- Accountability
- Respectfulness
- Enthusiasm
- Support
- Responsive to service users
- Engaging leadership style
- Strong customer service belief
- Transparency and honesty
- Discreet
Skills
Essential criteria
- Doctoral level knowledge of clinical psychology including highly developed knowledge of lifespan developmental psychology, models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, and two or more distinct psychological therapies.
- Expertise in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment, formulations, intervention and management frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration.
- Skills in assessing and managing potentially hazardous clinical situations
- Well developed and effective communication skills, oral and written
- To communicate complex, highly technical and clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and a wide range of lay and professional persons within and outside the NHS.
- Skills in providing consultation to other professional and nonprofessional groups.
- Doctoral level knowledge of research design and methodology, including complex multivariate data analysis as practiced within the field of clinical psychology.
- Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and mental health.
- Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS.
- Skill and experience in using IT systems including word processing, email and local electronic patient information systems.
Other
Essential criteria
- Enthusiasm for a broad range of psychological phenomena, an interest in models of service delivery, and an ability to articulate the value added by clinical psychology services within the context of multidisciplinary mental health services.
- Ability to identify, provide and promote appropriate means of support to carers and staff exposed to highly distressing situations and severely challenging behaviours.
- Ability to identify, and employ, as appropriate, clinical governance mechanisms for the support and maintenance of clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour
- Ability to develop and use complex multi-media materials for presentations in public, professional and academic settings.
- Ability to meet the travel requirements of the post
Desirable criteria
- A commitment to the evaluation of services, enthusiasm for both multi-professional and uniprofessional audit, and a wish to continue to develop expertise in the service area.
- Record of having published in either peer reviewed or academic or professional journals and/or books
- Ability to articulate and interpret clearly the role of the profession of clinical psychology based upon a good understanding of the framework of government and national professional policy.
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
- Dr Rachael Clarkson
- Job title
- Consultant Clinical Psychologist
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Telephone number
- 01772 377960
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