Preceptorship Clinical Psychologist Band 7-8a

Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust

Liverpool City Region

GBP 40,000 - 60,000

Job description

Available as a Band 7 Preceptorship for newly/recently qualified practitioner

Specialist Community Adult Learning Disability Team, based at Willis House, Whiston, Merseyside.

We are seeking a Clinical or Counselling Psychologist who is highly motivated and enthusiastic about working with adults with a learning disability. We are pleased to consider applications from recently qualified practitioners to commence in a Preceptorship Post (commence at AfC Band 7).

This post is based with the St Helens and Knowsley Specialist Community Learning Disability Team within the Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. We are committed to supporting your professional development, with service development opportunities and regular clinical supervision.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will be required to work as part of our established and highly supportive multi-disciplinary team. Core clinical functions include aspects of assessment, intervention, consultation, clinical team formulation, training, working with and across multi-disciplinary teams and systems, and supporting our programme of audit and research.

The post is supervised by the Consultant Clinical Psychologist and jointly managed with the team manager. You will be joining an expanding group of psychologists with a wide range of experience and interests.

Job description

Job responsibilities

To provide a qualified clinical psychology service according to a plan agreed with the multi-disciplinary team and within the overall framework of policies and procedures.
To provide specialist psychological assessment and therapy at the same time as offering advice and consultation on service users' psychological care to psychologist and non-psychologist colleagues and to other, non-professional carers, working autonomously within professional guidelines.
To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.
The psychology team provides a highly specialist service providing assessment and intervention to service users with learning disabilities and histories of complex problems, including offending and challenging behaviours.
To provide highly specialist psychological assessments of service users referred to psychology based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from various sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with service user, family members and others involved in the service users care.
To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a service user's mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the service user's problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
To exercise autonomous responsibility for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
To evaluate and make skilled 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.
To work with other professions to deliver therapy in an integrated manner.
To provide highly specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to service user formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all service users of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the service user group.
To ensure that all members of the service users' clinical team have access to a psychologically based framework for the understanding and care of forensic service users, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological knowledge, research and theory.
To actively undertake and co-ordinate risk assessment and risk management for individual service users and to provide advice and liaise with other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.
To participate in multi-disciplinary and multi-agency risk assessment in complex service networks.
To work as a member of a community-based and ward-based multi-disciplinary team, exercising clinical responsibility for the service user's psychological care-planning within this role and being part of wider MDT decisions around clinical decisions, capacity, risk and discharge planning.
To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of service users under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.
To provide staff supervision/reflective space for ward-based staff.
To manage the workloads of assistant clinical psychologists and trainee clinical psychologists, within the framework of the team/services policies and procedures and have clinical responsibility for their work.
To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues.
To contribute to the pre- and post-qualification teaching of clinical and/or counselling psychology and other disciplines, as appropriate, including the supervision of clinical psychologists in training.
To contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of the team's operational policies and services, through the deployment of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit.
To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence-based practice in individual work and work with other team members.
To initiate and undertake appropriate research and provide research advice to other staff undertaking research.
To represent the views of the psychology team on such committees and working parties.
To contribute to divisional policies and procedures and feedback progress within senior divisional meetings.
To lead the relevant research activity within the psychology team as required by the service.
To foster and inspire innovative ideas and developments aimed at enhancing the experience of service users and carers, and support their development through research and/or service development.
To undertake service development, including complex audit and service evaluation, with colleagues within the service to help develop service provision.
To advise both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing and to lead on these projects.
To be involved, as appropriate, in the short listing and interviewing of assistant / graduate psychologists, and of team members from other professions, where appropriate.
To exercise responsibility for managing the psychological resources available to the team, in the form of psychological materials employed in the assessment and treatment of service users and to assist in clinically related administration, conduct of audits, collection of statistics, development of audit and/or research projects, training and project work.
To contribute to the training and support of other staff in psychological care, including contributing to the organisation of training seminars and conferences for others.
To maintain up to date knowledge of clinical and policy related best practice and new developments in the field of personality disorder.
To manage information resources relating to this and ensure their wide availability, working closely with Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust knowledge, services and relevant external partners.
To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning the historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family or group.
To contribute to the development of systems to support, mentor and supervise service users working in the service.
To be engaged and participate in the future development of the psychology team and promote a culture of continuous service improvement.
To act as part of a gate-keeping team in assessing individuals as part of pre-admission assessments.

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

A First or Upper Second honours degree in psychology OR a lower class with a post-graduate qualification, (e.g.: Master's degree).
ECDL or demonstrable proficiency with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Publisher and SPSS.
Post-graduate doctoral level training in Clinical Psychology as accredited by the BPS.
Registration with HCPC as a Practitioner Psychologist.

Desirable

Further training in relevant areas of professional psychology, mental health practice, autism, personality disorder and/or research design and analysis.
Post-doctoral training in additional specialised areas of psychological practice such as risk assessment, autism, positive behaviour support, personality disorder, substance use and/or specific therapeutic modalities.

KNOWLEDGE/ EXPERIENCE:

Essential

Assessed experience of work for a minimum of six months within the field of learning disability.
Post-qualification experience of working with individuals with histories of problems of complex, multi-factorial origin.
Experience of working with a variety of service user groups, across the whole life course and a full range of care settings, maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse and threats of physical abuse.
Experience of exercising clinical responsibility for service user's psychological care and treatment, both as a profession and also within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
Experience of teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision.

Desirable

Experience of working in a multi-disciplinary team/ experience of working alongside staff from other disciplines.
Experience of multi-professional management of teams and/or services within learning disability.
Experience of representing the profession in local policy fora.
Experience of the application of psychological theories within different cultural contexts.
Personal experience of mental health problems.

Skills

Essential

Doctoral level knowledge of clinical psychology in relation to working with people with learning disability and behaviours that challenge/mental health/offending.
Skills in the use of methods of psychological assessment & formulation.
An excellent ability to communicate, both orally and in writing, complex, technical and clinically sensitive information, to service users, their families and a wide range of professionals within and outside of the NHS.
Skills in providing consultation to other professional and nonprofessional groups.
Doctoral level knowledge of research design and methodology.
Knowledge of legislation and the implications for both clinical practice and professional management in relation to the client group and mental health issues in general.
Ability to identify, provide, and promote appropriate means of support to carers and staff exposed to highly distressing situations and challenging behaviours.
Ability to identify and employ where appropriate, clinical governance mechanisms for the support and maintenance of clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging.