We are excited that our prison services are transforming in partnership with other healthcare providers across our BEH London Prisons and are looking for candidates who are interested in working in prison mental health to come and work with us in our Mental Health Hub. This role includes working across Early Days in Custody, Planned Care, Unscheduled (Crisis Care) and Release and Transfer.

The mental health provision at HMP Brixton is a specialist mix of psychological therapies, speech and language therapy, forensic psychiatry, nursing, and occupational therapy.

We are looking for an experienced psychologist, ideally with prison experience, to join our rich MDT and lead on embedding trauma-informed care at HMP Brixton. This is an exciting new post providing an opportunity to lead on changing the prison culture and will rely on strong relationship, clinical, leadership and creative skills.

The post holder will work with the therapies team to ensure they work to an agreed operational policy offering a high standard of care and an integrated triage, assessment and intervention for individuals within our prison settings who are presenting with mental health problems.

The successful candidate will benefit from a supportive team and opportunities for continued professional development - for example, this year we have supported staff to complete their EMDR and ADOS training and have an ongoing commitment to staff training and wellbeing.

Main duties of the job

This is an exciting opportunity to provide a qualified specialist psychology service to service users under the care of the Mental Health team and Therapies Service at HMP Brixton. The role includes providing specialist psychological assessment and therapy, at the same time as offering advice and consultation on service users' psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues. The post holder will also provide supervision to unqualified and qualified psychology staff and support senior staff to further develop the service. They will utilise research skills for audit, policy, service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

Unfortunately, due to security restrictions and vetting requirements, we are not able to accept applications from overseas individuals without a National Insurance number.

About us

In this post, you will be part of a broader specialist Directorate of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust, known as the North London Forensic Service (NLFS). The NLFS provides Forensic Mental Health care for a wide catchment area, namely Camden, Islington, Haringey, Enfield and Barnet. Psychology provision covers a wide spectrum of services including admission and intervention inpatient care in both medium and low secure services, specialist outreach services, consultation with probation services and psychological input to specialist prison programmes.

The service inputs to several large prisons in the London area, works with Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police units and provides diversion services from local courts. The department has strong links with London psychology training courses, both clinical and forensic, providing regular placements to a number of trainees. The catchment area is exceptionally ethnically diverse with a high level of psychiatric morbidity and social deprivation.

The post holder will be working with people with complex needs, many of whom suffer from a severe and enduring mental illness and/or neurodiversity, which may present itself at times in episodes of violence to others or the environment. Thus, specialist skills, in particular 'forensic awareness', is required of all staff working in NLFS.

Job description Job responsibilities
Please see Job description and Person Specification for detailed description of the main responsibilities.

Person Specification Person Spec Essential

• Doctoral level training in clinical psychology. OR Doctoral level training in forensic psychology with full competencies completed. OR Doctoral level training in Counselling Psychology
• Registration with HCPC
• Experience of working within a forensic setting/service (ideally prison environment) either in a B7 role, or as a trainee

Desirable

• Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and mental health.
• Experience of transformation and change management
• Skill in the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in working with mentally disordered offenders

Any attachments will be accessible after you click to apply.

306-BEH-801