Are you passionate about improving inpatient care for adults and young people with learning disabilities, autism and behaviour that challenges? Do you want to enable psychologically informed working in assessment and treatment units?

We have a new role at the Kingswood Centre for a Principal Clinical Psychologist to lead our inpatient psychology provision. The post holder will work as part of the multi-disciplinary team to provide psychological assessment, formulation and interventions and facilitate psychological thinking in the wider team. We want to become a trauma informed service, and the post holder will play a key role in developing and implementing this model.

The successful applicant may have contact with patients or service users. As an NHS Trust we strongly encourage and support vaccination as this remains the best way to protect yourself, your family, your colleagues and of course patients and service users when working on our healthcare settings.

Main duties of the job

The aim of this role is to provide and develop the clinical psychology and psychotherapy service on inpatient wards for adults and young people with a Learning Disability, as a part of the wider Multi-Disciplinary Team. Working with the inpatient therapies team, qualified psychologist, and Positive Behaviour Support Assistants, this will include providing psychological assessment, formulation and interventions directly and indirectly to service users, their families and wider systems. The post holder will also provide teaching, training, consultation and supervision to the wider team, to facilitate a psychologically informed approach to service users and contributing to the ongoing training and development strategy. This will include contributing to the implementation of trauma informed approaches within the inpatient wards, and working to establish and maintain a psychologically safe environment for patients and staff. The post holder will engage in audit, policy and service development and research within inpatient Learning Disability services and contribute to the wider Learning Disability Clinical Psychology Service. Alongside their own caseload, the post holder will provide supervision and clinical leadership to psychological professionals and the multi-disciplinary team. They will facilitate the development of pre-qualified staff (Assistant Psychologists and Trainee Clinical Psychologists) and contribute to Continuing Professional Development across the service.

About us

As a service we work to improve the lives and recognise the potential of people with learning disabilities through our direct clinical practice and support to other services. We value the rights of people who have a learning disability, including quality of life, health and wellbeing, independence and supporting relationships. We also value the expertise of those who supportpeople with learning disabilities and the support given by families, carers and communities to facilitate the most inclusive and least restrictive care

We aim to provide high quality clinical care for our service users in the least restrictive way, working with people with learning disabilities, their families and communities and other professionals to improve people's quality of life and physical and mental health.

Job description Job responsibilities

Clinical:

To work as a senior clinician, providing an advanced, highly specialist psychology service within the inpatient Learning Disability Service

To provide highly specialist psychological assessments for adults and young people admitted into the Learning Disability wards. The psychologist will be expected to deliver services 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 clients, family members, the MDT and others involved in the clients care.

To provide expertise and specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals, to assist in the formulation, diagnosis and treatment of clients.

To provide specialist consultation and guidance to colleagues, other professionals, carers and families on the use of psychological interventions and especially positive behaviour support plans

To provide reports and communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients.

To provide expertise and advice to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of psychological care by all staff within the service, and support the implementation of psychological care plans.

To liaise with other health and social care staff, from a range of agencies, in the care provided to clients.

To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.

To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.

To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of their admission.

Teaching, training, and supervision

To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues.

To be responsible for providing specialist training and supervision for clinical psychology trainees, psychologists, assistant clinical psychologist and other health professionals. This includes the assessment and management of learning disabilities and autism and development of assessment and treatment packages.

To provide professional and clinical supervision to assistant psychologists, trainee and qualified psychologists in the Psychology Services, as required.

To provide clinical placements for trainee clinical psychologists as required, ensuring the trainees acquire the necessary skills, competencies and experience to contribute effectively to psychological care, and to contribute to the assessment and evaluation of such competencies.

To contribute to the pre- and post-qualification teaching of clinical and/or other applied psychologists, as appropriate.

To provide advice, consultation, training and supervision, where appropriate, to inpatient staff and other health and social care staff working with the client group.

Management, recruitment, policy and service development

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To participate as a senior clinician in the development of a high quality, responsive and accessible service including advising both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing, including identifying service need.

To exercise delegated responsibility for managing the psychological resources available to a team, whether in the form of additional qualified and unqualified graduate psychology staff, or in the form of psychological materials employed in the assessment and treatment of service users, and to delegate responsibility in the team when appropriate

To exercise responsibility for the systematic governance of psychological practice within the service/team, including its coordination and evaluation

To manage the workloads of assistant and trainee clinical psychologists, within the framework of the trust and services policies and procedures.

To participate as appropriate in staff recruitment, both in the short-listing process and as a member of interview panels for assistant, trainees and qualified clinical/counselling psychologists.

To work in a co-ordinated and co-operative way with other psychologists employed within local services and the wider psychology services in the Trust. This will involve participation in the effective development and organisation of the trusts Psychology Services by attendance at meetings as required. The postholder will be required to attend the regular clinical and professional meetings of the Psychology Service within the designated directorate and other departmental meetings

Research and service evaluation

To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence based practice in individual work and work with other team members.

To undertake appropriate research and provide research advice to other staff undertaking research.

To initiate project management, including complex audit and service evaluation, with colleagues within and across the service to help develop and improve services to service users and their families

To ensure the incorporation of psychological frameworks into the evaluation, monitoring and development of the teams operational policies, through the use of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit.

To disseminate research from work that the post-holder has been involved in a way that will benefit the services provided by the Trust. This will include feedback from any training opportunities that the post-holder has been able to attend as part of their employment with the Trust

IT responsibilities

To be ICT literate able to summarise information using excel/powerpoint and prepare reports using word processing packages

To use video conferencing facilities to deliver psychological interventions where required.

To use teleconferencing/ video conferencing facilities to participate in meetings where required.

The post holder will input and maintain appropriate electronic and manual clinical records and statistical data and provide this to the appropriate service manager/head of speciality when necessary.

The postholder will engage in relevant computer and ICT training as required.

The postholder will be responsible for ensuring that those psychologists he/she is responsible for/supervises engage in relevant computer and IT training as required and will input and maintain appropriate computer and manual clinical records and statistical data.

General

To contribute to the development and maintenance of the highest professional standards

of practice, through active participation in internal and external CPD training and

development programmes, in consultation with the post-holders professional and service

manager(s).

To contribute to the development and articulation of best practice in psychology across

the service, by continuing to develop the skills of a reflexive and reflective scientist

practitioner, taking part in regular professional supervision and appraisal and maintaining

an active engagement with current developments in the field of clinical psychology and

related disciplines.

To maintain the highest standards of clinical record keeping including electronic data

entry and recording, report writing and the responsible exercise of professional self governance in accordance with professional codes of practice of the British Psychological Society and Trust policies and procedures.

To maintain up to date knowledge of legislation, national and local policies and issues in

relation to both the specific client group and mental health.

Person Specification Qualifications Essential

• Doctoral level training in clinical psychology, including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology, as accredited by the BPS.

Desirable

• Pre or post-qualification training in a relevant area, such as systemic psychotherapy or Positive Behaviour Support
• Completion of Clinical Supervision training to enable the post-holder to provide placements for trainee clinical psychologists
• Pre-qualification training and qualifications in research methodology, staff training and/or other fields of applied psychology.

Experience Essential

• Substantial experience of working in Learning Disability services, across a range of abilities, including service users presenting with mental health problems, autistic spectrum disorders, and other challenging behaviours.
• Experience of teaching and trainin
  
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  333-J-LD-0238-A