Principal Psychologist

Are you a skilled and experienced Clinical Psychologist looking to lead and shape psychological services? This role offers an exciting leadership opportunity, as an 8b Principal Psychologist, to provide high-quality psychological care, develop innovative clinical pathways, and support staff and service users within a 14-25 community Youth Mental Health Team covering the beautiful Great Yarmouth and Waveney area.

The role will involve working alongside a diverse multi-professional team, providing clinical oversight of the psychological therapies offered within the team and offering direct clinical supervision to the 8a Clinical Psychologist.

The team strives to be dynamic and creative and are dedicated to providing a needs-led approach to improve the lives of children and young people by providing a mental health service to be proud of. It is a service that shows compassion, kindness, and hope at a time when families need it most. The team can support hybrid and flexible working patterns to ensure a balanced and healthy work life.

Main duties of the job

Clinical Leadership: Provide strategic clinical leadership across a community youth mental health team for young people between the age of 14 and 25, ensuring high standards of psychological care.

Service Development: Expanding access to psychological assessment, formulation, and evidence-based interventions, enhancing collaboration, treatment choice, and effectiveness.

Supervision & Line Management: Offer supervision / line management to psychological professionals and trainees, fostering a culture of learning and excellence within the service.

Training & Development: Supporting and where appropriate implementing and delivering training to embed psychologically informed practices within the multidisciplinary team, supporting a stepped care model of psychological care.

Staff Wellbeing & Resilience: Promote staff wellbeing by leading reflective supervision and post-incident support enhancing resilience and retention in challenging environments.

Clinical Practice: Maintain a clinical caseload, delivering high-quality, comprehensive psychological assessment and interventions for complex clients within the service.

Service User Engagement: Lead co-produced service development, empowering service users to actively shape psychological services through meaningful collaboration.

Innovation & Research: Collaborate with local universities to support teaching, supervise doctoral trainees. Contribute to research and quality improvement initiatives.

About us

Here at NSFT we pride ourselves on being a welcoming, talented, friendly and supportive team who like nothing better than sharing experiences and learning from each other. In addition to ongoing training and development opportunities, we are committed to providing an environment in which you can thrive.

Why work for us? We have challenges as a Trust, but we have ambitious aspirations, are pushing ahead with exciting transformation work and we need dedicated individuals to support us on our journey. We have strong, established professional networks coupled with an exceptional leadership team who will ensure you are truly cared for and cared about.

The Great Yarmouth & Waveney Youth Team covers a beautiful coastal area, from South Norfolk down to Southwold; where you can expect big stretches of sandy beaches, iconic seaside towns and friendly villages set in the heart of the Broads National Park. We are lucky to have some highly recommended schools in the area and the locality is recognised as a great place to raise a family. There are lots of independent cafes and shops, award-winning restaurants, along with plenty of activities throughout the area to enjoy on your days off.

Job responsibilities

Please find attached our Job Description and Person Specification for more detail on your Key Accountabilities, then if you feel you have what it takes to make a difference in your local communities, click APPLY!

Some of the benefits you can expect:

• a comprehensive in house & external training programmes
• career progression
• starting annual leave of 27 days per annum increasing to 33 days pa based on length of service (plus paid bank holidays)
• NHS discounts and many more.

Interview dates are yet to be set; you will be contacted via email and invited to book a time. These emails may go to your SPAM, so please keep checking all your emails if applying.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• Post-graduate doctoral level training in clinical psychology, or its equivalent, including eligibility for chartered status with the BPS
• Further postqualification, postgraduate training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice
• Registered as a Practitioner Psychologist with the Health Care Professions Council (HCPC)
• Evidence of CPD in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice

Experience

• Specialist complex psychological assessment and treatment of people with a wide range of mental health problems, of varying severity and complexity.
• Application of psychology in different cultural contexts
• Extensive experience of working as a qualified clinical psychologist and evidence of specialist knowledge gained through practice and ongoing training

Skills

• Use of complex methods of psychological assessment, intervention and management.
• Assessment, evaluation and management of risk associated with mental ill health and related psychopathology
• Well-developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively complex, highly technical and clinically highly sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS

Knowledge

• Well-developed knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in difficult to treat groups (e.g. personality disorder, dual diagnosis, people with additional disabilities etc.)
• Practitioner level knowledge of at least two models of psychological therapy
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS

Other

• Capacity to exercise careful clinical judgement whilst having the ability to work with and to hold the stress of others in the work setting
• Able to identify, and employ appropriate clinical governance mechanisms for the support and maintenance of clinical practice
• Ability to travel independently

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.