Job summary
- Main area
- Inpatient Mental Health - Secure
- Grade
- Band 8a
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week
- Job ref
- 350-SC7518008
- Employer
- Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Ashworth Hospital
- Town
- Liverpool
- Salary
- £47,810 - £62,682 Per Annum
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 04/11/2025 23:59
Employer heading

Registered Practitioner Psychologist
Band 8a
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Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust celebrates diversity and promotes equal opportunities; we are committed to challenging and eliminating racism and other forms of discrimination and advancing and promoting equality of opportunity in the provision of services and creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe that everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect.
We take positive action to support disadvantaged groups and also particularly encourage applications from ethnically diverse, disabled and LGBTQIA+ people that are under-represented in our workforce. Furthermore we welcome applications from reservists and ex-armed forces personnel as we recognise the benefits of the values, skills, training and experience that they bring to their work with us. We encourage all applicants to share their equality information with us.
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Job overview
We have a large yet well integrated and friendly psychology team of experienced admin staff, nurse therapists, and trainee and qualified clinical, forensic and neuro psychologists. We have strong teaching and training links with universities in the North of England, as well as hosting placements for trainees and interns from overseas.
The specialities of our team, and thus the therapies and other psychological interventions we offer, are diverse to ensure we can meet the wide breadth of needs of our service users. We encourage our staff to pursue their preferred clinical models where this fits with service need, and there will be opportunities for further training. Our aim is to support, develop and retain you through bespoke continuous professional development plans that will help you achieve your aspirations. We have a strong track record of providing and supporting a range of CPD activities and certificates. Equally important is our team’s wellbeing and we work as hard to facilitate and promote our self-care and sense of being valued and cohesive.
Main duties of the job
The core role involves providing specialist assessment and intervention for our service user group. We are integrated within multidisciplinary teams and provide consultation, reflective practice and support to those teams in order to provide the best possible care to our service users.
This is a permanent full time role. The post is open to either those about to complete training and looking for their first qualified post (Band 7 preceptorship), or those who are already qualified and looking for a change or a new challenge (Band 8a). We believe in supporting clinicians to grow into the psychologist they aspire to be. As part of the clear progression pathway towards Band 8a, our preceptors join monthly CPD group in slots addition to their regular individual supervision sessions to scaffold such growth and further your transferable skills.
Working for our organisation
We offer a range of attractive benefits including free onsite car secure parking; a designated desk space with two computer screens and no hot desking; fully stocked stationary cupboard; a fully equipped free onsite cardio and weight gym, swimming pool and fitness sessions.
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, Wales and the West 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.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Please see attached Job descriptions for both Band 7 preceptorship and Band 8 Senior psychologist roles
Person specification
Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Doctoral level training (or equivalent) in a professional area of psychology conferring HCPC registration as a practitioner psychologist.
- Current HCPC registration
Desirable criteria
- Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice
- Chartered registration with the BPS
KNOWLEDGE/EXPERIENCE
Essential criteria
- Knowledge and skills development to meet factor 2 level 8 requirements.
- Demonstrated clinical experience of working as a registered psychologist with the service user group accessing the service in which this post is based.
- Demonstrated experience working as part of a multidisciplinary team and/or liaison with multidisciplinary clinicians and/or stakeholders.
- Demonstrated experience in undertaking specialist assessment, formulation, care planning and interventions.
- Experience of working with a wide variety of service user groups, experiencing complex needs and presenting problems.
- Experience of working with presenting problems that reflect the full range of clinical severity
- clinical severity • Experience of maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, v e r b a l abuse and the threats of physical abuse.
- Demonstrated ability to work independently on own initiative. While utilizing clinical supervision systems to maintain safe and effective practice.
- Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for service users psychological care and treatment, within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan
- Formal training in clinical supervision and experience of supervision of junior psychological staff and/or other disciplines.
- Experience of teaching, training
- Experience of engagement with leadership and/or management in service development.
Desirable criteria
- Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.
- Knowledge of organisational dynamics and institutional factors relevant to the delivery and effectiveness of secure inpatient mental health and PD services. Research/publications on relevant issues.
Skills
Essential criteria
- Well-developed skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment incorporating a range of methodologies, e.g. clinical interview, psychometrics, structured clinical tools.
- Well developed clinical intervention skills. Including at least one modality- specific clinical training to a standard eligible for accreditation.
- Ability to assimilate complex information from a range of sources to complete psychological formulation and clinical risk assessment in order to develop effective treatment plans for service users with complex needs
- Experience of delivering psychological intervention in a range of formats to service users with complex needs.
- Demonstrated ability to effectively engage service users who may present with significant clinical obstacles to engagement.
- Demonstrated Ability to maintain clear and appropriate personal and professional boundaries and to recognise own limitations.
- Well developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, highly technical and clinically sensitive information to service users, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
- Demsintrated Skills in providing consultation to other professional and non professional groups.
- Knowledge of research design and methodology, including complex multivariate data analysis as practised within the field of applied psychology
- Knowledge of legislation in relation to the service user group and area of service delivery.
- Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the HCPC/BPS.
- Evidence of recognised Formal training in supervision of other psychologists
- Well developed ability to utilise IT systems such as MS Office
Desirable criteria
- Completion of training in specialist clinical and risk assessment tools in the area of specialisme.g. HCR-20, START, SCID, IPDE, PCL-R, WAIS, AIDOS.
- Well developed knowledge of the theory and practice of assessment and specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat populations relevant to the post.
- Previous training and experience of delivering a range of recognised specialised therapies e.g. CBT, DBT, Schema therapy
- Evidence of training and experience with regard to the development of Management and leadership skills.
Applicant requirements
You must have appropriate UK professional registration.
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Michelle Green
- Job title
- Consultant Forensic Psychologist
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Telephone number
- 0151 472 4502
- Additional information
or Neil Jackson, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, [email protected]
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