Principal Practioner Psychologist AOT/GRIP

Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust; Cheltenham; Hybrid; GBP 39,000 - 45,000; Full time

Job summary

A regional health service provider in Cheltenham seeks a dynamic practitioner psychologist to enhance mental health services for adults with psychosis and bipolar disorder. This role involves providing expert clinical leadership, direct psychological care, and supervision within community teams across Gloucestershire. Ideal candidates will have a strong commitment to service development and quality improvement, alongside a focus on collaboration and flexible working arrangements.

Responsibilities

• Provide specialist psychological formulation, assessment and direct care.
• Supervise, reflect and consult with colleagues and teams.
• Contribute to service development, including teaching and research.
• Lead workstreams on psychological approaches to care.
• Manage and support psychological professionals, assistants and trainees.

Job description

The post could be offered as a 30 hours per week or Job share depending on applicants and we may be able to offer full time hours for the right candidate. An exciting opportunity has arisen for a dynamic highly skilled and experienced practitioner psychologist to join our mental health services focusing on working with adults with psychosis. This is an exciting time to be joining the Trust as we are looking at improving our services for people experiencing psychosis and bipolar disorder and expanding the psychological provision in our teams. Working across a number of community teams you will provide expertise in both direct clinical work and leadership/supervision of teams in psychological approaches to care. This is a key clinical leadership role, working within teams and responsible for continuing to drive and embed the significant work already undertaken to develop services for people with psychosis across Gloucestershire. The post holder will be responsible for providing highly-specialist advice and consultancy to staff, teams, and patients with direct responsibility for the provision of psychological services within the teams, including supervision of assistants and trainees. They will also have a key role to play in service development and quality improvement across care pathways. This role covers teams based in Gloucester, Cheltenham and across the county. All reasonable flexible working requests will be considered, but the post holder will be expected to work across sites in line with service need. Our specialist mental health services work with adults with severe mental health problems. About 60% of the people we work with have experienced psychosis, and we aim to provide psychologically and trauma informed care and evidence based interventions including CBT-P and Family Therapy.

In this role you will:

• Work as part of MDT's providing specialist psychological formulation, assessment and direct care.
• Provide supervision, reflective practice and consultation/advice to colleagues and teams.
• Contribute to quality improvement and service development, including research and development activities such as teaching.
• Leading workstreams on psychological approaches to care, and specifically working as a part of our developing psychosis pathways.
• Line manage, supervise and support other psychological professionals, assistants and trainees.

We have a skilled and dedicated workforce of over 5000 colleagues working in a diverse range of services over 55 sites and within people's homes. We strive to enable a welcoming workplace culture that builds and celebrates civility, inclusivity and diversity, while providing a sense of belonging and trust. Annual staff surveys, regular Pulse surveys and other engagement opportunities provide our people with lots of opportunity to tell us about their experiences of working with us. In the latest staff survey, 61% of colleagues gave us their views. It was great to hear that:

• 72% of colleagues would recommend the Trust as a place to work, ranking us 1st for Provider Trusts in the South West region on this question.
• 76% would recommend the standard of care provided in our services if a friend or relative needed treatment, also ranking us 1st in the South West region.
• 81% said that care of patients and service users is the Trust's priority, compared with an average in comparable NHS Trusts in England of 64%.

This high-level overview shows we are in a healthy position, with higher scores than average for comparable organisations, alongside a great response rate, indicating good staff engagement. However, we also know we have plenty of room for improvement in many areas. To that end, we continue to prioritise and invest in our commitment to genuinely becoming a Great Place to Work with consistent top-quartile performance in the annual staff survey and Pulse surveys.