Band 7​/Practitioner Psychologist Preceptorship - FIRST

Go back Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust

The closing date is 15 February 2026

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a compassionate and motivated Band 7/8a Practitioner Psychologist to join our forensic community service.

Forensic Intensive Recovery Support Team (FIRST) is a specialist forensic community mental health team based in South Birmingham and covering the West Midlands area. The aim of the service is to contribute to the successful transition of adult service users with significant risk histories and mental health difficulties out of secure inpatient services and support their continued recovery and risk management in the community.

The Psychological Therapies team within FIRST is made up of practitioner psychologists, an art psychotherapist, a specialist psychological practitioner, and assistant psychologists.

As a psychologist within FIRST, your role will involve providing assessment and interventions on an individual basis to service users in inpatient settings (as part of in-reach work to support their transition) and community settings, as well as opportunities to deliver some group interventions. Therapeutic work is focused on areas that contribute to maintaining successful discharge and ongoing recovery in the community, including managing risks and mental illness and adapting to life out of secure care.

We are currently increasing our consultation offered to other community services, such as local CMHTs, so there will also be scope to contribute to this type of consultation and liaison work. You will have opportunities within FIRST to supervise and manage others, as well as contributing to training, service development, audit and evaluation.

We acknowledge that working within forensic services can be challenging, so you will have access to a range of wellbeing support, including team reflective practice and wellbeing spaces. One of the many benefits of working in our Secure Care and Offender Health division is being part of a large and diverse group of practitioner psychologists across a variety services, with regular opportunities to come together to share good practice and collaborate within strategic working groups.

There is access to a range of model-specific supervision in addition to individual supervision. Within the directorate there are also colleagues trained in Compassion Focused Therapy, Schema Therapy and Narrative Therapy. This offers individuals the opportunity to hone their therapeutic skills and develop practice relating to service need. As a forensic service, we balance interventions for mental health with offending needs, incorporating structured clinical judgement tools as routine practice within our work.

If you are new to forensic practice, we will help to support your knowledge and skills development, so you feel confident in your work.

Welcome to Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. Our 4000 clinical and support staff help us to improve mental health wellbeing and meet the needs of the 70,000 people we serve each year. We provide a range of mental healthcare services across Birmingham and Solihull, as well as specialised services nationally. We also offer medical, nursing and psychology training and are proud of our international reputation for both research and innovation.

Our population is culturally diverse, characterised in places by high levels of deprivation which create an increasing demand for our services and a necessity for us to make sure everyone can access the help they need. We are a team of compassionate, inclusive and committed people working together to provide excellent care to support our community. If you are looking for a place to belong, where you can make a real difference to people's lives, join our team where our warm welcome is waiting for you.

For further information about the main responsibilities please view the attached job description and person specification.

Psychology recruitment ()

• Satisfactory completion of a British Psychological Society accredited Doctoral Level postgraduate professional training course in clinical/forensic psychology completion of which includes the study of models of psychopathology, psychometric neuropsychological assessment, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology.
• Eligibility for entry onto the Register of Chartered Psychologists

• Experience of 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.
• Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups, including forensic contexts with clients of all ages across the lifespan and of wide-ranging presenting problems that reflect the full…