Principal Clinical Psychologist

The Principal Clinical Psychologist will ensure the systematic provision of a high-quality, specialist clinical psychology service to clients, families and carers across all sectors of care. This includes providing specialist psychological assessment and therapy, and offering expert advice and consultation on clients' psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and other professionals.

The post holder will supervise and support the psychological assessment and therapeutic work undertaken by other psychologists and clinical team members. They will work autonomously within professional guidelines and hold responsibility for the systematic governance of psychological practice within the service.

The role also includes providing staff training and development, utilising research skills for audit, policy and service development, and contributing to the overall management of the service. The post holder will work as part of multidisciplinary teams with close links to a range of agencies.

Main duties of the job

Person specification

Education / Qualifications

Essential

• Post graduate doctoral level training in clinical psychology (or its equivalent for those trained prior to 1996) as accredited by the BPS, including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics, and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology.
• Registration with the Health Professions Council as a Clinical Psychologist

Desirable

• Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice.

Experience

Essential

• Substantial assessed experience of working as a qualified clinical psychologist with 2 years at a highly specialist level
• Experience working with a wide range of client groups across the life course and across all care settings (outpatients, community, primary care, inpatient, and residential), while maintaining professionalism in highly emotive, distressing, or abusive situations
• Experience exercising full clinical responsibility for clients' psychological care and treatment, both as a care coordinator and within a multidisciplinary care plan.

Desirable

• Experience of working in older people's mental health services, including people with dementia and their carers.
• Experience in neuropsychological assessment with adults with comorbid mental health/psychological needs
• Experience of assessing and treating clients across the full range of care settings.

Skills/Abilities/Knowledge

Essential

• Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment, intervention and management, frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration

Desirable

• Well-developed knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat groups (eg. Personality disorders, dual diagnoses, people with medically unexplained symptoms, people with additional disabilities, people with dementia, etc).
• Well-developed knowledge of the theory and practice of highly specialised psychological therapies and assessment methodologies.

About the employer

Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children's centres, schools and people's homes.We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.

Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families. This is strengthened by our new values: