Principal Clinical Psychologist

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 ethnic minorities, 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.

Job overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen to join the Adult Eating Disorders Service in St Helens & Knowsley as a Band 8b Principal Clinical Psychologist. The service has been undergoing transformation and expansion and this is an exciting time to join our supportive and friendly team.

The multidisciplinary team provides outpatient assessment and intervention to adults over the age of 18 with eating disorders. We offer a range of evidence-based psychological therapies including CBT, MANTRA and SSCM. Our team consists of a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Clinical Psychologists, CBT Therapist, OT, Dietitian, Mental Health Wellbeing Practitioners, Senior Nurse Practitioner, and Assistant Psychologists. We also work closely with other services and professionals including primary care, GPs, inpatient services (Specialist Eating Disorder Units and medical wards) and other secondary care mental health teams.

We are seeking to appoint a Psychologist with excellent communication skills, values, and relevant skills and experience in the speciality, to contribute to providing leadership to the team and supporting service development.

Main duties of the job

We are looking for a qualified Clinical Psychologist with the relevant skills, values, and experience to provide a high-quality psychological service to individuals with eating disorders.

The post holder will:

1. Demonstrate a strong interest and commitment to working with people with complex psychological presentations. Experience of working with people with eating disorders would be highly desirable.
2. Work closely with the Consultant Clinical Psychologist and other members of the leadership team and contribute to clinical leadership by providing clinical, professional and management supervision, consultation, training, and advice.
3. Support the clinical lead in the systematic governance of psychological practice within the service.
4. Utilize research skills for audit, evaluation, and service development.

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

Principal Responsibilities:

1. To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the service based upon the appropriate use, interpretation, and integration of complex psychological 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 mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client's problems, and employing methods of proven efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
3. To be responsible 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.
4. To evaluate and make 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 autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment, and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
6. To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance, and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients' formulation, diagnosis, and treatment plan.
7. To ensure that all members of the treating service have access to a psychologically based framework for understanding and care of clients of the service, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological research and theory.
8. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide general advice to other professionals on psychological aspects of risk assessment and management.
9. To act as care coordinator, if appropriate ensuring the provision of a care package appropriate for the clients needs, coordinating the work of others involved with care, tasking responsibility for arranging CPA reviews as required and communicating effectively with the client, his/her family, and all others involved in the network of care, and to monitor progress during the course of multi-disciplinary interventions.
10. To communicate in a 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-disciplinary and multidisciplinary care.
11. To provide expertise, advice, and support to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of Psychological care by all members of the treatment service.
12. Will be required to sit in a constrained position for client therapy and extended assessment sessions.
13. Will be required to tolerate and manage frequent verbal abuse and occasional physical aggression.
14. Will be required to deal with the intense emotional atmosphere surrounding therapy contacts which may be highly distressing on a daily basis, and to work with frequent intense concentration for much of the clinical sessions of assessment and therapy. This will include writing reports of a potentially distressing nature e.g., safeguarding adults.

Policy and service development

1. To participate as a senior clinician in the development of a high quality, responsive and accessible service including advising both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing.

Clinical supervision, teaching and training

1. To provide clinical placements for trainee psychologists, ensuring that trainees acquire the necessary skills, competencies, and experience to contribute effectively to good mental health care and to contribute to the assessment and evaluation of such competencies.
2. To provide post-qualification training (CPD) and clinical professional supervision to recently qualified psychologists attached to the service.
3. To provide specialist advice, consultation, and training and clinical supervision to other members of the service for their provision of psychologically based interventions to help improve clients' functioning.
4. To provide pre- and post-qualification teaching of psychology as appropriate.
5. To maintain and develop skills in the area of professional pre- and post-graduate training and clinical supervision.
6. To provide advice, consultation, and training to staff working with the client group across a range of agencies and settings, where appropriate.
7. In common with all Clinical Psychologists, receive regular clinical supervision in accordance with good practice guidelines.
8. Receive specific specialist clinical supervision in psychological approaches in trauma focused / -related mental health issues and presentations.

Person specification

Qualifications
Essential criteria

• Post-graduate doctoral level training in clinical psychology (or its equivalent for those trained prior to 1996) as accredited by the BPS, including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology.
• Registered with the Health Professions Council as a Clinical Psychologist.

Desirable criteria

• Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice. Post-qualification specialist training in particular psychotherapeutic approaches e.g., cognitive analytic psychotherapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, CFT, EMDR etc.

Knowledge/Experience
Essential criteria

• 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.
• Knowledge of attachment theory.
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS.
• Formal training in supervision of other psychologists or equivalent experience 50 hours supervision in a specific modality, case presentations, group supervision supported by short courses approved by the Psychology Head of Service.
• Extensive experience of working as a qualified clinical psychologist, including in a specialist area.
• 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, in patient and residential care settings severity including maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse and the threat of physical abuse.
• Specialist experience in the area of complex trauma related mental health.
• Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for clients' psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care coordinator and also within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
• Experience of teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision.

Desirable criteria

• Well-developed knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat groups (e.g., personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities etc).
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of highly specialised psychological therapies and assessment methodologies.
• Experience of representing psychology within the context of multidisciplinary care.
• Experience of assessing and treating clients across the full range of care settings.
• Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.
• Experience of working within a multicultural framework.
• Experience of working within the specialist field of eating disorders with adults and their carers/families.

Values
Essential criteria

• Continuous Improvement
• Accountability
• Respectfulness
• Enthusiasm
• Support
• Responsive to service users
• Engaging leadership style
• Strong customer service belief
• Transparency and honesty
• Discreet
• Change oriented

Skills
Essential criteria

• Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment intervention and management frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration.
• Well-developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, highly technical, and clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers, and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Skills in providing consultation to other professional and nonprofessional groups.
• 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 demonstrate clinical leadership with a service sector.
• Ability to contain and work within organisational stress.
• Enthusiasm for a broad range of psychological approaches and interest in models of service delivery and ability to articulate the value added by clinical psychology services within the context of multidisciplinary team working.
• IT Literate

Please ensure you check the email account from which you apply for all correspondence. All information regarding your application will come from apps.trac.jobs not NHS Jobs.

Only those applicants who demonstrate clearly how they meet our person specification will be shortlisted for interview.

As a Disability Confident Employer, we offer a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants who consider themselves to be disabled who meet the minimum (essential) criteria for the role in the person specification. If you would like your application to be considered under the Trust's guaranteed interview scheme you can indicate this in the personal information section of your online application form.

Should you require a reasonable adjustment to our recruitment process please email recruitment@merseycare.nhs.uk to ensure that measures can be put in place to support you.

We reserve the right to close any vacancies from further applications when we have received a minimum number of applications from which to make a shortlist. Please ensure you apply without delay if you wish to be considered for this role.

The Trust expects all post holders who require an enhanced DBS for their role to subscribe to the DBS Update Service. You will be required to enrol for this service for a fee of £16 per year and maintain registration. Trans applicants who require a DBS check and do not want to reveal details of their previous identity can contact the DBS Sensitive Applications Team (01516761452 or email sensitive@dbs.gsi.gov.uk) with their application number once they have completed their DBS application form. The team can prevent any previous identity showing on the DBS Certificate, unless the applicant has a conviction under their previous details in which case this will need to be disclosed.

Applicants requiring sponsorship may wish to determine the likelihood of obtaining sponsorship for this position by assessing themselves against the criteria on the gov.uk website - https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa.

Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.

Please be advised that the use of Artificial Intelligence on applications is monitored and if you choose to use this, you must declare this on your application form.

Please note: new entrants to the NHS will commence on the first pay point of the relevant band.

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

• Job Description and Person Specification (PDF, 184.2KB)
• OH Risk ID (PDF, 152.4KB)
• A Great Place to Work (PDF, 2.1MB)
• Our People Promise and Charter (PDF, 5.8MB)
• Employee Benefits (PDF, 950.7KB)