Clinical or Forensic Psychologist

Role Overview

To provide a comprehensive, highly specialist clinical and forensic psychology service within the Mental Health Service. To provide highly specialist psychological assessment, formulation and intervention as well as offering advice and consultation regarding service users’ psychological care to other members of the clinical team. To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within Rampton Hospital.

Responsibilities

• Provide a highly specialist psychological assessment and therapy service to male service users within the Mental Health Service.
• Offer advice and consultation on psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the Hospital’s policies, procedures and service priorities.
• Participate fully in multidisciplinary clinical teams, at times leading them.
• Develop knowledge and skills in general aspects of forensic clinical psychology and the assessment and treatment of service users who are legally detained as ‘mentally disordered’ and experience a range of complex mental health difficulties.
• Conduct projects, working largely independently, with only general briefings and working directly to Trust senior managers.

Clinical or Work Practice

• Provide specialist psychological assessments to service users within the Mental Health Service, 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 user’s care.
• Formulate and implement plans for the psychological treatment and/or management of a service user’s mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the service user’s difficulties, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy.
• Implement a range of psychological interventions, individual and group, 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.
• Exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of service users whose difficulties are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
• Liaise closely with other members of the multidisciplinary team, giving authoritative specialist advice on psychological aspects of care, contributing directly to formulation, diagnosis and treatment planning.