Principal Systemic Family Therapist

Job overview

This role provides senior clinical leadership in the development, delivery, and embedding of systemic family therapy across the Forensic Directorate inpatient services, spanning medium secure and low secure settings. Low secure services include non-LD adult male wards as well as Learning Disability wards.

The post holder will operate with a high level of autonomy and professional authority, translating the Trust’s approved Family Therapy business case and policy into consistent, safe, and clinically effective practice across the forensic pathway. You will contribute to governance, service development, and evaluation activity, supporting equitable access to family interventions across medium secure, low secure, and low secure rehabilitation pathways.

The role combines advanced specialist clinical practice with service-level leadership. Alongside a defined caseload of complex family work, the post holder will provide consultation, supervision, and strategic input to multidisciplinary teams, ensuring that family-inclusive practice is integrated into assessment, risk management, care planning, rehabilitation planning, and discharge processes across diverse forensic populations.

We are serious about diversity and inclusion, and are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles like this one.

Main duties of the job

Responsibilities include:

Clinical Practice and Risk Interface

• Provide highly specialist systemic assessments and family therapy interventions with service users and their families across forensic inpatient services, where presentations are complex and risk, safeguarding, trauma, and relational rupture are prominent.
• Adapt systemic approaches to meet the communication, cognitive, and neurodevelopmental needs of individuals within Learning Disability services, ensuring accessible and neuroaffirming practice.
• Apply advanced systemic formulation to understand how family and relational dynamics interact with mental disorder, detention, and offending-related risk, and to support MDT decision-making.
• Contribute to psychologically informed risk formulation and management by advising MDTs on relational factors that may amplify or mitigate risk, including issues relevant to safeguarding, public protection, and victim considerations.
• Work collaboratively with Responsible Clinicians and ward teams to ensure family perspectives appropriately inform CPA processes, care planning, leave planning, and discharge pathways.
• Communicate complex and sensitive clinical information to families and networks in a manner that is clear, containing, and proportionate to risk and capacity.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Please refer to the attached job description for the full details on the responsibilities and person specification

At Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust, we are serious about diversity and inclusion, and we are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, and we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles, like this one.