Practitioner Psychologist

Merseycare; St Helens; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative NHS Trust is seeking a Band 7/8a Practitioner Psychologist to join their Mental Health Urgent Care team. This role offers the chance to make a significant impact by providing specialized psychological services across various care sectors. The Trust is committed to your professional development, offering extensive training opportunities in advanced psychological therapies. You'll work within a supportive multi-disciplinary team, championing psychological interventions and fostering collaborative relationships. Join a forward-thinking organization dedicated to delivering exceptional care and promoting equality and diversity in the workplace.

Benefits

Flexible working arrangements

Professional development opportunities

Supportive work environment

Access to training courses

Wellbeing programs

Qualifications

• Experience as a qualified clinical psychologist at a specialist level.
• Ability to provide psychological assessments and interventions.
• Knowledge of psychological therapies for difficult-to-treat groups.

Responsibilities

• Provide specialist psychological assessments and treatment plans.
• Monitor and evaluate treatment options for service users.
• Supervise and support clinical team members.

Skills

Clinical Psychology

Psychological Assessment

Communication Skills

Research Skills

Team Collaboration

Education

Doctoral level training in clinical psychology

Registration with Health and Care Professions Council

Post-doctoral training in specialized areas

Tools

Electronic Patient Information Systems

Job description

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Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust celebrates diversity and promotes equal opportunities; we are committed to challenging and eliminating racism and other forms of discrimination and advancing and promoting equality of opportunity in the provision of services and creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe that everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect.

We take positive action to support disadvantaged groups and also particularly encourage applications from ethnic minorities, disabled and LGBTQIA+ people that are under-represented in our workforce. Furthermore we welcome applications from reservists and ex-armed forces personnel as we recognise the benefits of the values, skills, training and experience that they bring to their work with us. We encourage all applicants to share their equality information with us.

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Job overview

This is an exciting opportunity to work as a Band 7/8a (dependent on experience and subject to preceptorship) Practitioner Psychologist in Mental Health Urgent Care in Mersey Care. The service works in to the Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment teams, First Response Service (crisis line), Core 24 AED Liaison, and Liaison & Diversion services across the trust.

The multi-disciplinary leadership team in the service area is very keen to support a strong psychological provision and pathways. The successful candidate will support the delivery of these pathways, developing a positive psychology influence.

Continual professional development is central to the post. We’ll provide you with a wide range of training to meet your individual and service needs. Over recent years, staff have been funded for training courses in: EMDR, ACT, DBT, MBT, CBT, CFT and full CAT training.

We’re keen on career progression and will support your training in leadership and management if you wish. Our aim is to support, develop and retain you at Mersey Care for many years to come!

The team work from bases in Mersey Care and travel around the patch will be required. This post will have their main base in Peasley Cross (St Helens).

**We welcome applications from those already qualified and those due to qualify in 2025. We have an excellent preceptorship programme and are committed to staff development**

Main duties of the job

The post holder will apply and maintain those skills acquired through specialist training and experience to monitor and ensure the systematic provision of highly specialised psychological services, provide a service to clients referred to the team, across all sectors of care, within an equality and human rights framework care, and supervise and support the other clinical members of the team who provide psychologically based care and treatment. The post holder will exercise delegated management responsibilities where appropriate and work autonomously within professional guidelines and exercise responsibility for the systematic
governance of psychological practice within the team. The post holder will utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research and propose and implement policy changes within the area served by the team.

A work plan will be developed with the post holder which will be reviewed on a regular basis depending on the needs of the service. It will be anticipated that you may have a trainee from the Clinical Psychology courses (Liverpool, Lancashire and Manchester).

Psychological input is highly valued by staff within services, so you’ll need experience of working with other services, championing psychological interventions and developing working partnerships.

Working for our organisation

Mersey Care is one of the largest trusts providing physical health and mental health services in the North West, serving more than 1.4 million people across our region and are also commissioned for services that cover the North West, North Wales and the Midlands.

We offer specialist inpatient and community services that support physical and mental health and specialist inpatient mental health, learning disability, addiction and brain injury services. Mersey Care is one of only three trusts in the UK that offer high secure mental health facilities.

At the heart of all we do is our commitment to ‘perfect care’ – care that is safe, effective, positively experienced, timely, equitable and efficient. We support our staff to do the best job they can and work alongside service users, their families, and carers to design and develop future services together. We’re currently delivering a programme of organisational and service transformation to significantly improve the quality of the services we provide and safely reduce cost as we do so.

Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

To provide specialist psychological assessments of service users 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
service users, and others involved in the service user’s care.

To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a service user’s psychological problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the service user’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy.

To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, 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, monitor progress and make highly skilled evaluations and 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, or group.

To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of service users whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.

To provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to service users’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plans.

To ensure that all members of the clinical team have access to a psychologically based framework for understanding and care of service users, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological research and theory.

To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual service users and to provide both general and specialist advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.

To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, highly complex information concerning the assessment, formulation, and treatment plans of service users under their care where there may be conflicting views, high emotion and significant barriers to understanding and change, and to monitor and evaluate progress during the course of both uni- and multidisciplinary care.

To provide expertise, advice and support to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of psychological care by all members of the treatment team.

Please refer to attached Job Description for a full list of duties and responsibilities.

Person specification

Knowledge/Experience

• Assessed experience of working as a qualified clinical psychologist at a specialist level for a significant period.
• Significant experience of representing psychology within the context of multidisciplinary care.
• Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for clients’ psychological care and treatment within the context of a multi-disciplinary care plan.
• Experience of teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision.
• methods of psychological assessment, formulation, intervention and management, frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration.
• Doctoral level knowledge of research design and methodology, including complex, multivariate data analysis as practiced within the clinical psychology.
• Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and mental health.
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS Formal training in supervision of other psychologists.
• Knowledge of IT systems including word processing, email and local electronic patient information systems
• Experience of assessing and treating clients across the full range of care settings.
• Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.
• Experience of working in the designated service area.
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat groups (e.g., psychosis, personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities etc.)
• High level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies.

Values

• Accountability
• Responsive to service users
• Engaging leadership style
• Transparency and honesty
• Discreet
• Change Oriented

Skills

• Well developed and effective communication skills to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Skills in providing consultation to other professional and non-professional groups.
• Ability to self reflect, use clinical supervision appropriately and consider complex organisational and team dynamics.
• Ability to identify provide and promote appropriate means of support to carers and staff exposed to highly distressing situations and severely challenging behaviours.
• Ability to identify, and employ, as appropriate, clinical governance mechanisms for the support and maintenance of clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour.
• Ability to teach and train others, using a variety of complex multi-media materials for presentations in public, professional and academic settings

Qualifications

• Doctoral level training in clinical psychology accredited by the BPS or its approved equivalent
• Registration with Health and Care Professions Council as Practitioner Psychologist
• Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice

Other

• Reasonable adjustments will be made for those with sensory impairment

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Please ensure you check the email account from which you apply for all correspondence. All information regarding your application will come from apps.trac.jobs not NHS Jobs.

Only those applicants who demonstrate clearly how they meet our person specification will be shortlisted for interview.

As a Disability Confident Employer, we offer a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants who consider themselves to be disabled who meet the minimum (essential) criteria for the role in the person specification. If you would like your application to be considered under the Trust’s guaranteed interview scheme you can indicate this in the personal information section of your online application form.

Should you require a reasonable adjustment to our recruitment process please email [e-mail] to ensure that measures can be put in place to support you.

We reserve the right to close any vacancies from further applications when we have received a minimum number of applications from which to make a shortlist. Please ensure you apply without delay if you wish to be considered for this role.

The Trust expects all post holders who require an enhanced DBS for their role subscribe to the DBS Update Service. You will be required to enrol for this service for a fee of £16 per year and maintain registration. Trans applicants who require a DBS check and do not want to reveal details of their previous identity can contact the DBS Sensitive Applications Team (01516761452 or email [e-mail] ) with their application number once they have completed their DBS application form. The team can prevent any previous identity showing on the DBS Certificate, unless the applicant has a conviction under their previous details in which case this will need to be disclosed.

Applicants requiring sponsorship may wish to determine the likelihood of obtaining sponsorship for this position by assessing themselves against the criteria on the gov.uk website - https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa.

Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.

Please be advised that the use of Artificial Intelligence on applications is monitored and if you choose to use this, you must declare this on your application form.

Please note: new entrants to the NHS will commence on the first pay point of the relevant band.

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Employer certification / accreditation badges

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.

Name Katie Pownell Job title Consultant Clinical Psychologist Email address [e-mail] Additional information

John Cunningham, Principal Clinical Psychologist: [e-mail]

FULFIL YOUR POTENTIAL AND SPREAD YOUR WINGS WITH MERSEY CARE

At Mersey Care, our commitment to ‘perfect care’ lies at the heart of everything we do, a person centred care that starts with you. It’s a pledge to create an environment and staff support that will enable you to do the best job you can possibly do, to be the best you can possibly be.

You’ll be joining one of the most innovative and progressive NHS trusts in the country. One that offers specialist inpatient and community services to support physical and mental health and specialist inpatient mental health, learning disability, addiction and brain injury services. We are the founding member of the Zero Suicide Alliance, and one of only three Trusts in the country which delivers high secure mental health care.

You’ll be made to feel at home, joining an 11,000 strong Mersey Care family comprising doctors and nurses, as well as countless other roles from dieticians to dentists, from data analysts to physiotherapists. You'll find a full list of our roles in our A-Z list.

You’ll have a home in the North West of England where your work/life balance is respected and working from sites easily commutable from Liverpool, Manchester, North Wales and Cheshire with many roles operating a hybrid working system.