Department: Adult Mental Health and Disability Service
Location: Lakeview Hospital, Gransha Park, Londonderry
Contract and Hours: Temporary, Part-time (7.5 hpw)
Position required Londonderry required until 7th March 2025 initially.
Successful Band 7 Candidates will progress to Band 8a following a fully supported preceptorship programme, over a set period of time and upon meeting all competencies required for band 8a post. These competencies will be continuously reviewed through clinical and line management supervision and the Trust appraisal process.
Job summary
The Practitioner Psychologist will be responsible for providing a high quality specialist Psychology service to the clients of the Adult Intellectual Disability Psychological Therapies Service within the Western Health and Social Care Trust. This will be across all sectors of care; providing highly specialist psychological assessment and therapy at the same time as offering advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to non-psychology colleagues and to other, non professional carers, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures. Utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service
Main responsibilities
- To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the 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 clients, family members and others involved in the client’s care.
- To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of clients referred to the service, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
- 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 and make 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 provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to the clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
- To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.
- To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.
- To act as care co-ordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans including clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved in the network of care.
- To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.
For Band 7 and Band 8a specification view the full job description in the Additional Information section below.
