Principle Clinical/Counselling Psychologist

Job overview

We are excited to offer this new post which is part of recent additional investments to our Adult Inpatient Psychology Service. The post is primarily a clinical role, providing psychology input to our Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), with additional leadership responsibilities.

Our PICU ward is a 13-bed male ward based at Springfield Hospital. The ward has been undergoing a significant improvement programme over the past year. The post holder will provide psychology input via direct assessment and interventions with service users, as well as indirect input, via professional meetings, staff support and training.

The leadership component will involve deputizing for the lead psychologist for Acute and Urgent Care. This will include line management and supervision responsibilities for other psychologist in the team, as well as involvement in service development projects and contributions to other leadership activities.

The successful candidate will have experience of working with people with acute mental health difficulties, preferably in an inpatient setting. Additionally, experience of working along side different professional groups to embed psychological thinking to overall service as well as individual care planning will be essential.

Main duties of the job

To act as Deputy for the Clinical Lead, and in their absence, to exercise delegated responsibility as Clinical Lead for the service.

To provide a highly specialist clinical / counselling psychology service to clients on our Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). To include direct work with clients and indirect work with other professionals, and other people in the support network.

To have a lead role for information management. This includes managing service performance, and CQUIN data, and maintaining RiO data quality. In addition, to establish and maintain a database to measure clinical outcomes within the service, and to analyse and disseminate this data.

To supervise and support the psychological assessment and therapy provided by other qualified and trainee psychologists and other clinical members of the team who provide psychologically-based care and treatment.

To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research. To propose and implement policy changes within the area served by the Adult Inpatient service.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Clinical Duties: Providing consistent psychology input to ward one (PICU) MDT to include:
• Regular contribution to daily MDT meetings to plan patient care
• Joining MDT for individual patient reviews to ensure that psychological aspects of their difficulties and care planning are considered
• Direct sessions on the ward including individual patient assessment, formulation and treatment, as well as group and family sessions.
• Indirect input to MDT to support staff in day-to-day management of patients.
• Focus on patient who require one-to-one observations or seclusion to identify a pathway to reduce need for restriction.
• Provision of regular reflective practice. Other duties:
• Regular contribution to various aspects of service improvement for ward one.
• Provision of supervision to other qualified psychology staff working on acute wards.
• Contribution to wider service planning and improvement for the adult inpatient services.