Job summary
Building Attachment & Bonds Service (BABS) are looking to recruit an experienced Specialist Clinical Psychologists

The service sits within the Mersey Care Community Care Division but is hosted in the community in Family Hubs and Children Centres.

The post will involve providing specialist therapeutic parent-infant mental health support to vulnerable families in the antenatal/postnatal period.

The main focus of the BABS work is supporting parents and infants to build secure bonds and attachment relationships, and good parent infant mental health. It would be an advantage if the post holder has previous experience and/or an interest and passion for working in the specialist field of parent infant mental health; in particular, experience of working on an outreach, community-basis supporting vulnerable families in the community.

The successful applicant must be confident and skilled to work independently, and in collaboration/partnership with other professionals.

The successful applicant must be confident and comfortable working with safeguarding issues/concerns and the multitude of risks presented in the parent infant relationship. Most importantly, the successful applicant must have good interpersonal skills and qualities to build a good relationship and engage families with complex lives.

Band 7s & Secondments will also be considered for this post.

Main duties of the job
The post will involve providing specialist therapeutic parent-infant mental health support to families in the antenatal/postnatal period via Parent Infant Mental Health Assessments, psychological formulation and various parent-infant interventions.

Provide specialist psychological assessments of clients 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 clients, family members and others involved in the client's care.

The successful applicant will work collaboratively with the following professionals and teams to support vulnerable parents and infants:

• Community and Specialist/Public Health Midwives
• Mersey Care teams within the Child Health Directorate (Health Visitors, Family Nurses, Breastfeeding Team)
• Children Centre and Early Years Staff
• Perinatal Mental Health Teams
• Children's Social Care staff (Social Workers, Early Help and Family Support Workers Staff)

About us
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.

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

To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families 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, family or group.

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

To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment and treatment of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based enhanced care plans.

To provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients formulation, diagnosis and treatment plans.

To ensure that all members of the clinical team have access to a psychologically based framework for understanding and care of clients of the service, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological research and theory.

To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide both general and specialist advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.

To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, highly complex information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care where there may be conflicting views, high emotion and significant barriers to understanding and change, and to monitor and evaluate progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.

To provide expertise, advice and support to facilitate the effective and appropriate provision of psychological care by all members of the treatment team.

The candidate would be expected to provide staff support in the form of 1:1 supervision, peer support and reflective practice group on a regular basis

Person Specification
Qualifications
Essential

• Doctoral level training in relevant area of psychological practice accredited by the BPS or its approved equivalent
• Registration with Health and Care Professions Council as a Practitioner Psychologist

Desirable

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

Skills
Essential

• Well developed and effective communication skills, oral and written, to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information to individuals, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS
• Skills in providing consultation, reflective practice and clinical supervision to other professional and nonprofessional groups
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS
• Formal training in supervision of other psychologists
• Knowledge of IT systems including word processing, email and local electronic patient information systems

Experience
Essential

• Assessed experience of working as a HCPC registered practitioner psychologist at a specialist level for a significant period
• Significant experience of representing psychology within the context of multidisciplinary care
• Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for individuals psychological care and treatment
• Experience of teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision
• Expertise in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment, formulation, intervention and management frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration

Desirable

• Experience of assessing and treating individuals across the full range of care settings
• Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts

Knowledge
Essential

• Doctoral level knowledge of research design and methodology, including complex, multivariate data analysis as practiced within psychology
• Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and mental health

Desirable

• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in in specific difficult to treat groups (e.g., personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities etc)
• High level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Applicants must have current UK professional registration.

Employer details
Employer name: Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust
Address: Manor Farm Primary Care Resouce Centre, Manor Farm Road, Huyton, L36 0UB, United Kingdom
Employer's website: https://www.merseycare.nhs.uk/

Employer contact details
For questions about the job, contact: Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Dr Lisa Marsland, lisa.marsland@merseycare.nhs.uk, 07810204104