Clinical/Counselling/Forensic Psychologist

Job overview

Exciting new role for a Clinical/Forensic/Counselling Psychologist in our Specialist Community Forensic Team covering Oxfordshire!

Do you want to work with forensic service users – to help reduce the length of their admissions and support them to successfully transition into the community? Are you creative and passionate about service development and trauma-informed care? Do you enjoy multiagency and multidisciplinary working? If so, this job might just be for you!

Our service users have complex mental health difficulties, often including severe and enduring mental health problems and trauma histories, as well as risk histories. Transitions are often a time of anxiety for most of us, but particularly so for our service users who often have complex attachment needs and may have spent a significant length of time in secure care. The Specialist Community Forensic Team aims to provide intensive in-reach support to inpatients to help them to prepare for and navigate their discharges and safely settle into life in the community. We also seek to provide support to other services, such as housing providers and local Adult Mental Health Teams, so that our service users can increasingly access non-forensic provision and ultimately transition into primary or secondary care services.

Main duties of the job

The role includes supporting the MDT with developing psychological formulations and risk formulations, contributing to needs assessments, providing consultations and offering advice to other professionals/agencies/services, designing and delivering training, offering supervision, joint working, and direct therapeutic interventions with service users. The role involves a lot of interfacing with other teams, agencies and services. It is an exciting and varied position with lots of scope for creativity.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

The Specialist Community Forensic Team (SCFT) psychology role is varied and involves a combination of direct work with forensic service users and indirect work with teams/services with the aim of ensuring psychological thinking is integral to SCFT patient care. As a clinical, forensic or counselling psychologist holding doctoral level professional qualifications, the postholder will provide a highly specialist, multilevel clinical service that is cost-effective, culturally appropriate and based on best clinical and professional practice and that meets Trust and Divisional objectives, national strategic, and policy guidelines, commissioner requirements and user and carer needs and expectations. The aims are to help understand, prevent and ameliorate psychological distress and disorder, improve the mental health and well-being of users of the forensic service and reduce and manage risk. The role involves identifying service users who might benefit from further psychological work, conducting comprehensive assessments of personality, emotional well-being and risk, develop and share case formulations (including risk formulations), and delivering psychological interventions to enhance psychological well-being and reduce risk. The role will also involve a significant amount of indirect work, including providing supervision, training, consultancy and joint working opportunities for MDT colleagues and other agencies, in order to develop the skills and competencies of MDT colleagues and ensure interventions and plans are formulation driven and effective. We are committed to becoming a trauma-informed service which focuses on being needs-led and service user centred, with an acknowledgement that transitions are an incredibly challenging time for many service users. The postholder will play an integral part in ensuring trauma-informed care is at the heart of the SCFT’s work.

See Job Description for more detail.

We hope that the advert has given you a clear understanding of the skills we are seeking and the opportunity at hand. You will need to use the “supporting statement” element of your application form to demonstrate your suitability for this role and you should refer to the job description, person specification and the guidance notes attached to this role to help you tailor your application.

The essential and desirable criteria will be used to shortlist for interview, and you should ensure that you refer to these within your application to increase your chances of being selected for interview.

We are aware that some candidates may choose to use AI tools to support their application. We kindly remind applicants that submissions should remain an honest and accurate representation of their experience and must take care to ensure the use of AI tools does not generate an application that does not accurately reflect their knowledge, skills and values.

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.