Job overview

This newly created post offers a unique opportunity to work across the acute care pathway in Salisbury, with both an inpatient and community focus. 

The post-holder will provide a comprehensive psychology service to Ashdown inpatient unit, a 6 bedded male psychiatric intensive care unit (4 sessions) and South Wiltshire Intensive Service (5 sessions), with consultation to Mental Health Liaison Service (1 session).

The successful applicant will be a Clinical/Counselling Psychologist with clearly demonstrable skills, experience and knowledge of working in a fast moving, often challenging multi-disciplinary environment. You will be comfortable and confident working with a high level of involvement with a broad staff team and with a client group with high levels of complexity, risk, and need.

There is a strong focus on indirect work with staff teams, through team formulation, reflective practice, training and provision of supervision.

You will need to be well organised with the ability to prioritise your work according to clinical need and liaise effectively with team colleagues and professionals in other teams/services.

Supervision of junior psychologists. Manage and supervise the assistant psychologist.

There is the opportunity to help shape and develop the service dependant on skills and experience. 

We warmly welcome applications from recently qualified clinical/counselling psychologists, and  will support your development through a band 7 'Preceptorship' post.  

Main duties of the job

 To provide highly specialist psychological assessment and therapy to patients and carers as appropriate to the service. 

  To provide highly specialist advice and consultation on clients’ formulation and psychological management to other non-psychologist colleagues.

 To  use highly specialist psychological knowledge and skills to contribute to the more effective management of patients by the various teams in the area and where appropriate outside of the area.

To clinically supervise/line manage trainee clinical psychologists, assistant psychologists, CAPs and less experienced psychology staff, and other professionals.

To contribute to audit, research, policy and service development within the areas served by the Psychological Therapies Service.

 To develop and deliver training in psychological therapies for multidisciplinary staff.

For full job description and person specification, please see attached documents.

Working for our organisation

We are AWP (Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust): a diverse organisation with over 5,000 dedicated staff providing inpatient and community-based mental health care. 

We provide services from a range of locations to approximately 1.8 million people living in Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES), Bristol, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Swindon, across the county of Wiltshire and in parts of Dorset.

Our outstanding people promote mental health and wellbeing. The expertise and resources within AWP are dedicated to a person-centred approach for those who use our services and for all employees. We recognise that happy and fulfilled employees give better care.  

AWP is committed to support and create a positive research and evidence-based environment and culture, which can have a beneficial impact on everyone who works for the organisation and the care we provide to those who use our services.

At AWP we actively encourage applicants from all backgrounds; we are particularly keen to encourage applications from people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, those with disabilities and from the LGBTQ+ community. We want people to bring their unique blend of experiences, backgrounds, perspectives and knowledge to AWP, as diversity makes us stronger.