Clinical Psychologist/Forensic Psychologist/Counselling Psychologist

Job overview

We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic band 7 clinical psychologist to a permanent post within our friendly and high experienced talking therapies service in HMP Brixton. 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.). The post will also include working on the development of a new 8-bed in-patient unit within the prison. The successful candidate will have an opportunity to directly contribute to these 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 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

Clinical:

• 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 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 (including in-patient settings
• 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.

Consultation, Teaching, Training, and Supervision

• To provide consultation and training to other professionals within the unit developing understanding of psychological interventions; which will assist with day-to-day clinical practice.
• To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues.
• To gain additional highly specialist experience and skills relevant to clinical psychology and/or the service (as agreed with the service manager and professional psychology manager) .
• To develop skills in the area of professional post-graduate teaching, training and supervision and to provide supervision to other MDT staff’s psychological work as appropriate.
• To provide professional and clinical supervision of junior members of the department including qualified staff and trainees.
• To contribute to the pre- and post-qualification teaching of clinical, counselling and/or forensic  psychology, as appropriate.
• To provide advice, consultation and training to staff working with the client group across a range of agencies and settings, where appropriate.