Clinical Psychologist/Forensic Psychologist

Job overview

We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic band 7 Clinical or Forensic Psychologist to a permanent post within our friendly and highly experienced talking therapies service in HMP Pentonville. Pentonville is a remand prison, and there are opportunities to work with a diverse range of service users with complex mental health difficulties, trauma and neurodivergent needs. Psychology is closely integrated within the wider multidisciplinary mental health hub, which includes psychiatry, nursing, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. The post-holder will provide assessment and therapeutic interventions (individual and group), working directly with prisoners and staff, and also indirectly through liaison and consultation with the multidisciplinary team and other professionals (i.e. prison officers, safer custody, probation etc.). as well as supervision, provision of training and reflective practice. The successful candidate will have an opportunity to directly contribute to service developments as well as developing research and service evaluation initiatives.

Some previous experience of working in restrictive settings would be an advantage but we would also welcome applications from enthusiastic newly qualified psychologists.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will be required to support the delivery of care currently in the form of Integrated Care Pathways, enabling the service to meet the London Wide service specification standards for Prison Healthcare.

The post holder will support the therapies team to ensure they work to an agreed operational policy and offer integrated triage, assessment, risk management and intervention to individuals within our prison settings who are presenting with mental health problems in line with the Integrated Care Pathways.

To provide a qualified specialist psychology service to patients under the care of the Mental Health team, Therapies service and inpatient unit within the Prison. The role includes providing specialist psychological assessment and therapy, at the same time as offering advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures. To provide supervision to unqualified psychology staff and to support senior staff to further develop the service. To utilise research skills for audit, policy, service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

.To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the team 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.

· To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems or behavioural difficulties based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.

· 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.

· 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.

· To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.

· To provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.

· To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.

· To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.

· To act as care coordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans under CPA including clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved the network of care.

6 / 12

5. Research And Development

· Work alongside the Therapy Lead for prisons to agree priorities for research, audit and development