Clinical Psychologist

Description:

Join the Nexgen Team! Exciting Opportunity Awaits!

Job Title: Clinical/Forensic/Counselling Psychologist

Are you passionate about making a positive impact in people's lives? Do you have a heart full of compassion and a desire to make a difference? Consider a career as a clinical psychologist and unlock a world of personal and professional fulfilment.

What's in it for You?

· Heartwarming Connections: Forge meaningful relationships with individuals and families. Your compassion will create bonds that go beyond the ordinary.

· Every Day is Different: Embrace variety in your work as you cater to the unique needs of each person you care for. Say goodbye to monotony and hello to exciting new challenges.

· Personal Growth: Gain invaluable life skills as you navigate diverse situations. Develop resilience, empathy, and patience that will serve you well, both professionally and personally.

· Competitive pay: here at Nexgen we work closely with our clients to ensure that our fantastic team are paid a great salary for all their hard work and dedication.

· Work-Life Balance: A healthy work-life balance is essential. Enjoy flexible schedules and time-off options that cater to your personal needs, ensuring you can bring your best self to work every day.

This post requires a qualified psychologist with some managerial experience and knowledge of complex mental health and forensic needs to support the development and embedding of a trauma-informed mental health service model across one male establishment, HMP Winchester. Research shows that males coming into prison have multiple unmet social, emotional and mental health needs and high-risk behaviours that have persisted over time. Although individuals coming into prison may meet the diagnostic criteria for multiple disorders, their needs and risks can be best understood as arising within the context of traumatic life events and disrupted relationships, often beginning in childhood. Research shows that over 25% of the adult prison population has previously been in care and 55% of girls in the 15-18 age group in custody have spent time in care. The successful candidate is someone that understands the impact of childhood adversity and socio-cultural oppression/deprivation and its impact on mental health and offending behaviour. The needs and risks of people in prison can best be supported by using a psychologically informed approach to support the mental health team and the discipline staff in their day-to-day work with the residents. Supporting these relationships and upskilling frontline professionals in their daily interactions will enable the residents to acquire the skills necessary to manage their own emotions and behaviour more effectively. This approach focuses on supporting both mental health and discipline staff in working collaboratively through developing awareness of trauma processes and how this impacts both residents and professionals interpersonally as well as on how this contributes to the maintenance of survival strategies and/or risky behaviours. This approach does not preclude the use of specialised interventions, or existing processes and roles within the current mental care health pathway, but integrates these into a more comprehensive pathway that also includes the discipline staff and other professional groups within the different settings.

The role focuses on offering clinical support and oversight to the Integrated Mental Health Team (IMHT) in the form of training, reflective practice/ clinical supervision, case consultations & clinical supervision of Assistant Psychologists. The role also includes core duties such as undertaking psychological assessments, supporting complex multi-disciplinary formulations and delivering psychological interventions for cases of great complexity. Currently, therapeutic expertise across our services includes cognitive-behavioural, schema focused, compassion focused, EMDR, dialectical behaviour and mentalisation based therapies. Experience of using and reporting structured clinical judgment tools is desirable and a familiarity with relevant psychometric assessments essential. The emphasis is to provide a high quality, psychological service for individuals with complex, long term problems. There is an expectation that you’ll contribute through consultation with the prison to discussions and management of complex patients and feed into prison processes such as the Assessment Care in Custody Teamwork (ACCT) process and the Challenge, Support and Intervention Plan (CSIP). To support the current Talking Therapies and Psychology delivery and assist the integrated mental health team in the overall development of the availability of evidence based therapies.

The role involves the delivery and oversight of both 1:1 and group-intervention as part of the Trauma Informed ‘Making Sense’ Programme.

To deliver teaching and training to healthcare staff and prison staff as required as well as contribute to the training programme for the organization.

To contribute to the development of audit, service evaluation and research profile as appropriate

Qualifications:

* Satisfactory completion of a British Psychological Society accredited Doctoral Level postgraduate professional training course in clinical psychology (the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, or its equivalent for those trained prior to 1996), the completion of which includes the study of models of psychopathology, psychometric and neuropsychological assessment, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology.

* Assessed experience of working as a qualified clinical/forensic/counselling psychologist for a minimum of 3 years post qualification. Highly developed theoretical and practical knowledge of the field of clinical/forensic psychology, consistent with doctoral level professional training and further post qualification study, training and supervised experience as a qualified psychologist.

* Experience of highly specialist psychological assessment and individual and group based treatment of clients across the full range of care settings, including primary and secondary/ specialist care and inpatient/residential, outpatient and community team settings and forensic settings.

* Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups, with clients of all ages across the lifespan and of wide-ranging presenting problems that reflect the full spectrum of clinical complexity and severity.

* Skills in the use of highly complex methods of psychological assessment commensurate with doctoral level training, including specialist clinical interviewing, behavioral observation, complex psychometric testing and specialist neuropsychological testing.

* Highly developed interpersonal and communication skills (written and verbal) including the ability to empathically, sensitively and effectively communicate clinical and condition related information to clients, their families, carers and professional colleagues (within and outside the organization) that is extremely complicated or technical; extremely sensitive and potentially distressing to the recipient; or that is extremely contentious or challenging.

* Registered with professional body or regulatory body as appropriate to psychological therapy discipline i.e., HCPC/BPS

* Evidence of continuing professional development as required by the professional body.

* Experience working with psychological Trauma

* Team Player

Desirable

* Highly developed knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in specific 'difficult to treat' groups (e.g. personality difficulties, challenging behaviour, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities, people on the neurodiversity spectrum etc).

UK Registration

* Applicants must have current UK professional registration