Psychologist Leading FERN Service

Go back Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust

The closing date is 18 March 2026

This role is offered on a permanent basis. The hours are part-time, 22.5 hours per week.

This is an exciting opportunity to join the complex emotional needs service that is established in Gloucestershire. The service sets out to improve responding where ever people present, using trauma informed awareness and a commitment to reducing re‑traumatisation across systems.

This post is a newly developed post that will be dedicated to leading the FERN – Frequent Engagement Response Network, a service specifically set up to support emergency services and to help individuals experiencing distress to co‑create person centred response plans drawing on psychological formulation.

The post holder will be working with lived experience practitioners, assistant psychologists, specialist practitioners, multi‑agency safeguarding leads and emergency services to coordinate appropriate responses and to ensure that the client’s voice is at the centre of any decision making. Additionally, the post holder will coordinate monthly multi‑agency clinical concerns meetings where referrals are discussed and decisions made.

• To take an Applied Psychologist stance to working with individuals, teams and organisations in order to inform psychological ways of working within and across services.
• To directly provide and co‑ordinate highly specialist psychological assessment and intervention services to individuals/ groups/organisations, using a variety of applied psychology models.
• To provide clinical supervision for pre-qualified psychology staff according to experience and general/specialist psychological model. To provide placements and supervision to Doctoral Clinical Psychology trainees and other psychological practitioners in training.
• To participate in relevant research and audit activity and to utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development
• To take an active role in promoting psychologically informed assessments through systemic interventions supporting a wide range of partner agencies along with friends, families and accommodation‑based staff.

The qualification, training & experience requirements for the role are underlined in the Job Description/Person Specification.

We have a skilled and dedicated workforce of over 5000 colleagues working in a diverse range of services over 55 sites and within people’s homes. We strive to enable a welcoming workplace culture that builds and celebrates civility, inclusivity and diversity, while providing a sense of belonging and trust.

Annual staff surveys, regular Pulse surveys and other engagement opportunities provide our people with lots of opportunity to tell us about their experiences of working with us. In the latest staff survey, 61% of colleagues gave us their views. It was great to hear that:

• 72% of colleagues would recommend the Trust as a place to work, ranking us 1st for Provider Trusts in the South West region on this question.
• 76% would recommend the standard of care provided in our services if a friend or relative needed treatment, also ranking us 1st in the South West region.
• 81% said that care of patients and service users is the Trust’s priority, compared with an average in comparable NHS Trusts in England of 64%.

This high‑level overview shows we are in a healthy position, with higher scores than average for comparable organisations, alongside a great response rate, indicating good staff engagement. However, we also know we have plenty of room for improvement in many areas. To that end, we continue to prioritise and invest in our commitment to genuinely becoming a Great Place to Work with consistent top‑quartile performance in the annual staff survey and Pulse surveys.

Clinical

To carry a caseload and provide a direct service for psychological issues which demand more than a standard therapeutic approach (e.g. basic CBT may have been tried unsuccessfully, methods may need significant adaptation, particular challenges exist in maintaining a therapeutic relationship).

To draw appropriately…