Senior Psychologist

Job overview

Do you thrive on team working and providing collaborative complex formulations and consultation? Would you like to use these to help improve the wellbeing and recovery of individuals who are in the Criminal Justice System? An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced psychologist to join our established Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Service as maternity cover to the Eastbourne and Hastings Probation offices.

The OPD Community Pathways Partnership provides consultation and training to probation staff working with high risk individuals who are screened into the pathway due to identification of personality difficulties or traits.

The wider core OPD pathway provides a ‘wrap around’ service for people on probation with a wide range of psychological difficulties. It anticipates that pathways for this client group are non-linear, complex and often challenging. The model strives to provide consistency in the form of robust relational engagement between the Person on Probation and the probation officers (known as Community Offender Manager, COMs).

Main duties of the job

You will have extensive experience in working with individuals with personality difficulties, provision of training and in offering supervision/consultation to health and/or criminal justice staff.

Your role is to support the COM with the range of skills and additional knowledge to help manage the challenges of the client group with complex personality presentations. These include providing collaborative consultation and formulation, completed between you, the COM and where applicable, the Person on Probation. You will provide monthly training to the probation team on a variety of aspects of personality difficulties, discuss challenging case presentations and assist staff to reflect on the impact of working with this group of people.

As a team we often drawn on schema and trauma informed approaches and we welcome applicants with an interest in this area. All roles within our team have access to national and local OPD training and continuing professional development is actively encouraged and supported.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Requirements:

• To be skilled in providing consultation and generating collaborative formulations tailored to the needs of probation staff and passionate about increasing their knowledge and understanding of complex personality difficulties within forensic populations.
• To be confident in working autonomously alongside different teams and open to appreciating the benefits and challenges of partnership working.
• To be creative in offering training on personality difficulties to your teams, which upskills them in such a way that they the integrate psychologically informed understanding and reflection into their everyday practice.