Senior Practitioner Psychologist

Transformationunitgm; Liverpool; On-site; GBP 53,000 - 61,000; Full time

Job summary

An established healthcare provider is seeking a Senior Practitioner Psychologist to deliver specialized psychological services for staff. This role involves conducting comprehensive assessments, implementing effective interventions, and providing guidance to clinical teams. The successful candidate will play a crucial role in enhancing mental health support within the organization, contributing to research efforts, and promoting psychological well-being among staff. This position offers the chance to work autonomously while collaborating with a dedicated team, making a significant impact on the health and well-being of the workforce.

Qualifications

• Post-qualification experience as a practitioner psychologist.
• Expertise in providing psychological care and treatment.
• Experience in staff support services and service development.

Responsibilities

• Provide specialist psychological assessments and interventions.
• Supervise junior staff and provide expert consultation.
• Conduct research and evaluate psychological services.

Skills

Psychological Assessment

Psychological Interventions

Research Methodology

Clinical Supervision

Risk Assessment

Education

Postgraduate Doctoral Level Training in Psychology

Registered with HCPC as Practitioner Psychologist

Post-doctoral Training in Specialised Areas

Job description

Main area Occupational Health and Wellbeing Service Grade Band 8a Contract Permanent Hours Full time - 37.5 hours per week Job ref 287-CEF-523-24

Employer Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Employer type NHS Site Aintree Town Liverpool Salary £53,755 - £60,504 per annum Salary period Yearly Closing 09/05/2025 23:59

Senior Practitioner Psychologist

Band 8a

Job overview

To provide a high quality and highly specialised psychology service for Trust staff.

To provide appropriate support for Trust staff which is complementary to the resources offered regionally and nationally

To be a highly specialist resource on psychological care to the wider service and to coordinate and contribute to providing education, training and supervision activities to enhance psychological support and treatment across the service.

To use research skills for needs assessment, audit, evaluation, service development and other research activity to support continued development of the service.

To apply highly specialist expertise, gained post-qualification, in psychological treatment and research to clinical work and leadership in evaluation and research.

To supervise junior staff as required.

To promote psychology and the service within the local health, social care and research communities.

To work autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of Trust policies and procedures.

Main duties of the job

1. To provide highly developed specialist psychological assessments of staff based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources.
2. To be responsible for implementing a range of highly specialist psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across clinical teams, and in synthesis, adjusting and refining of psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
3. To 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, family or group.
4. To provide expertise and specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to staff members’ treatment.
5. To provide expertise and advice to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of psychological care by all members of the clinical team(s) involved with care of staff members.
6. To provide expert consultation about the psychological care of staff members to relevant staff and agencies outside the Trust.

Working for our organisation

Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was created on 1 October 2019 following the merger of two adult acute Trusts, Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust.

The merger provides an opportunity to reconfigure services in a way that provides the best healthcare services to the city and improves the quality of care and health outcomes that patients experience.

The Trust runs Aintree University Hospital, Broadgreen Hospital, Liverpool University Dental Hospital and the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

It serves a core population of around 630,000 people across Merseyside as well as providing a range of highly specialist services to a catchment area of more than two million people in the North West region and beyond.

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Detailed job description and main responsibilities

1. To provide highly developed specialist psychological assessments of staff based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with staff, family members and others involved in their care.
2. To formulate plans for formal psychological treatment and/or management of patients based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of staff members’ problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
3. To be responsible for implementing a range of highly specialist psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across clinical teams, and in synthesis, adjusting and refining of psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
4. To 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, family or group.
5. To address the needs of informal carers and family members as appropriate.
6. To exercise full responsibility and autonomy for the psychological treatment and discharge of staff members ensuring appropriate assessment, formulation and interventions, and communicating and liaising with referrers and others involved with the care on a regular basis.
7. To provide expertise and specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to staff members’ treatment.
8. To ensure that all members of the clinical team(s) in which the psychologist works have access to a psychologically based framework for the understanding and care of patients of the service, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological knowledge, research and theory.
9. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for relevant individual staff members and to provide both general and specialist advice for psychologists and other professionals on psychological aspects of risk assessment and management.
10. To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of patients under the consultant’s care and to monitor and evaluate progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.
11. To provide expertise and advice to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of psychological care by all members of the clinical team(s) involved with care of staff members.
12. To provide expert consultation about the psychological care of staff members to relevant staff and agencies outside the Trust.

Person specification

Qualifications

• Satisfactory completion of postgraduate doctoral level training in psychology (or its equivalent for those trained before1996) as accredited by the BPS.
• Eligibility for entry onto the British Psychological Society Register of Chartered Psychologists.
• Registered with HCPC as a Practitioner Psychologist
• Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice
• Specialist training or demonstrable expertise in one or more areas of research methodology

Experience

• Post-qualification experience of working as a practitioner psychologist
• Experience of working as a qualified psychologist with healthcare professionals.
• Working with a wide variety of client groups, across the adult life course and presenting with the full range of clinical severity across a range of care settings including outpatient and in-patient settings
• Maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems.
• Exercising full clinical responsibility for clients’ psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care co-ordinator and also within the context of a multi-disciplinary care plan
• Teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision
• Representing the profession in local policy or planning forums.
• Experience in staff support services
• Experience in service development and/or innovation
• Membership of national professional or interprofessional groups
• Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts
• Experience of research in relevant settings

Knowledge

• Doctoral level knowledge of research methodology, research design and complex data analysis as practiced within the clinical fields of psychology
• Advanced theoretical and practical knowledge of psychology, consistent with doctoral level professional training and further post qualification study, training and/or supervised experience.
• Highly developed knowledge of the theory and practice of highly specialised psychological therapies.
• Specialist clinical knowledge of psychology, consistent with previous experience in a similar setting
• Ability to plan, organise and provide teaching and training on relevant psychological topics, using a variety of complex multi-media materials suitable for presentations within public, professional and academic settings
• Knowledge of relevant legislation and DoH policy and implementation guidelines, and of the implications of such documentation for clinical practice and professional management in relation in health care services in particular
• Evidence of continuing professional development consistent with expected standards of the British Psychological Society and relevant subdivisions (e.g. Division of Clinical Psychology).
• Familiarity with the ethical and professional standards expected of Clinical Psychologists as laid down in the collated BPS ‘Code of Ethics and Conduct’ (2009).
• Awareness and thorough understanding of the political, social and economic policy framework within which health and mental health services are delivered and an ability to articulate and interpret clearly the role of the professions of clinical, health and counselling psychology within this context.
• Experience of research in psychological aspects of staff support.
• Post-qualification experience of research in an NHS setting.
• Experience of working in a clinical research environment
• Specialist knowledge of staff support

Please ensure you check the email account (including junk/spam boxes) from which you apply regularly as we will use this to contact you regarding your application.

Posts advertised to ‘internal staff’ are open to employees of hospitals within University Hospitals of Liverpool Group and you should confirm your employment within your application form.

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

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.

Candidatesapplying for the role of Healthcare Assistant on the staff bank should note that due to the nature of the role, workers must be aged 18 or above when commencing in post. Applicants are therefore welcome from those aged over 18 or within 3 months’ of their 18 th birthday.

The Trust is committed to promoting a healthy work-life balance and achieve fair, equitable and consistent practice. We welcome flexible working requests and will consider a variety of flexible working arrangements from day one of your employment. Not all roles are suitable for every flexible working opportunity all of the time. Flexible working options may include reduced hours, compressed hours, fixed shifts, time back in lieu and home working.

The Trust is committed to promoting equality and diversity; we value the contribution of individual talent, skills, knowledge and experience and aim for a workforce demography representative of the local community. We encourage applicants from the following groups that are currently under-represented in our workforce black, Asian and minority ethnic, lesbian, gay, bisexual and Transgender (LGBTQ+), disabled, male and age 16-24.

Trust policy requires that the cost of submitting & processing the successful applicant/s DBS application be recovered via salary deduction following start in post. The amount of £23 (standard disclosure) or £43 (enhanced disclosure) will be deducted from salary, in manageable monthly instalments for up to 3 months following commencement of employment. Bank posts require upfront payment. DBS applications submitted from 2nd December will be subject to the new DBS fee of £26.50 (standard) and £54.50 (Enhanced).

From April 2017, Skilled visa applicants and their adult dependant(s) will be required to provide a criminal record certificate from each country they have lived in consecutively for 12 months or more in the past ten years.

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.

This organisation has a zero-tolerance approach to the abuse of children, young people and vulnerable adults. All staff must ensure they adhere to the organisations safeguarding children and adults’ policy and comply with the Local Safeguarding Children and Adult Board procedures.

Staff should be mindful of their responsibility to safeguard children and adults in any activity performed on behalf of the organisation in line with the requirements of statutory guidance and legislation.

All employees (and volunteers)are expected maintain their safeguarding knowledge and skills by completing mandatory safeguarding training which includes understanding and recognising the signs of abuse and neglect and taking appropriate action.

As an organisation, we have adopted the Merseyside Domestic abuse workplace scheme which supports our staff who are experiencing Domestic Abuse /any forms of sexual violence.

If you have any personal requirements that will enable you to participate in our recruitment process please contact a member of the Recruitment Services by phone on 0151 706 4666 at the earliest opportunity to ensure that measures can be put in place to enable your application for this post.

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

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.