Practitioner Psychologist​/Senior Psychotherapist

This is an exciting fixed term opportunity to be a part of the psychology team within the Early Intervention for Psychosis Service in Mersey Care, based at Baird House, Liverpool.

The post is open to applicants who are qualified as HCPC registered practitioner psychologists and/or BABCP accredited CBT therapists and a major part of the role will be the provision of CBT to service users experiencing first episode psychosis.

The role is 0.6wte (22.5hrs/week) over a 9 month period to cover maternity leave within an established and highly regarded Early Intervention service working in a specialist multidisciplinary community based team to support the recovery of people who have experienced a first episode of psychosis.

High quality supervision is available to support further development of your clinical skills whilst working in a friendly and caring team environment that is both supportive and rewarding. The post provides an ideal development opportunity for someone wishing to build their knowledge and skills in working with this client group.

If you have a passion for providing exceptional care and are looking for an exciting, varied and challenging role within EIP, we would welcome your talents and skills.

The team is based on Baird House, Liverpool, and travel around the patch will be required.

The post holder will apply and maintain those skills acquired through further specialist training and experience to monitor and ensure the systematic provision of highly specialised psychological services, provide a service to clients referred to the team, across all sectors of care, within an equality and human rights framework care and supervise and support the other clinical members of the team who provide psychologically based care and treatment.

The post holder will exercise delegated management responsibilities where appropriate and work autonomously within professional guidelines and exercise responsibility for the systematic governance of psychological practice within the team. The post holder will utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research and propose and implement policy changes within the area served by the team.

A work plan will be developed with the post holder which will be reviewed on a regular basis depending on the needs of the service.

Mersey Care is one of the largest trusts providing physical health and mental health services in the North West, serving more than 1.4 million people across our region and are also commissioned for services that cover the North West, North Wales and the Midlands.

We offer specialist inpatient and community services that support physical and mental health and specialist inpatient mental health, learning disability, addiction and brain injury services. Mersey Care is one of only three trusts in the UK that offer high secure mental health facilities.

At the heart of all we do is our commitment to 'perfect care' - care that is safe, effective, positively experienced, timely, equitable and efficient. We support our staff to do the best job they can and work alongside service users, their families, and carers to design and develop future services together. We're currently delivering a programme of organisational and service transformation to significantly improve the quality of the services we provide and safely reduce cost as we do so.

Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.

To provide specialist psychological assessments of service users referred to the team based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with service users, and others involved in the service users care.

To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a service users psychological problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the service users problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy.

To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, and groups, within and across teams employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.

To evaluate, monitor progress and make highly skilled evaluations and decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, or group.

To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of service users whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.

To provide…