Family Therapist

Priory Hospital Bristol is an elegant 18th century country residence set in beautiful parkland close to the centre of Bristol, less than 5 minutes away from the M32 leading directly onto the M4/M5 motorway.

Bristol is part of the Healthcare Division of Priory Group. It has 77 beds over seven wards varying from Eating Disorders, Acute Mental Health, Adult Psychiatric Intensive Care, Acquired Brain Injury, Huntington’s and Dementia, along with a growing outpatient therapy service.

The Priory purpose is to make a real and lasting difference for everyone we support through supporting our service users to ‘Live Your Life’. Our values are;

- Striving for excellence

- Putting people first

- Being positive

- Acting with integrity

- Being supportive

Priory Hospital Bristol is looking to recruit a Family Therapist to the Eating Disorder inpatient service and general psychiatry outpatient service onsite. This is a full-time permanent position, which is an exciting opportunity to provide a systemic family therapy service to the patients receiving inpatient care on our Specialist Eating Disorder Unit and outpatient treatment within our Private therapy service.

Main duties of the job

This will involve providing specialist systemic assessment & intervention for the patients and their families. Participating in assessment, care planning, facilitating psycho-educational and parent support groups.

Offer advice and consultation on the psychological care of patients and their families to colleagues, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures

The successful candidate will also attend or contribute to ward rounds, CPAs, MDT assessments, team formulations and care planning.

Offer systemic family therapy to carers and patients using a range of systemic interventions.

Offer systemic consultations across the MDT and contribute to thinking about patients and their families from a systemic psychotherapy perspective.

Run reflective groups to develop systemic thinking across staff groups.

To work closely with relevant other professionals as appropriate.

To undertake risk assessment and risk management of patients.

The post holder will also offer Outpatient appointments working within our Day Care Therapy Service.

Job responsibilities

Clinical:

To provide specialist assessments to adults who are receiving treatment on our Eating Disorder ward and referred for therapy within our outpatient service.

To be responsible for implementing a range of systemic family therapy and psycho-educational interventions for individual patients, carers, families and groups.

To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of patients whose treatment is managed by psychologically-based care plans.

Teaching, training and supervision:

To receive regular clinical supervision from a senior family therapist and where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues

To provide advice, consultation and training to staff working with the patients across the Eating Disorder service and Private Outpatient service.

Person Specification

Experience:

Essential

Experienced in both 1:1 and family/group work

Experienced in working within inpatient mental health services and out-patient mental health services

Desirable

Previous experience within Eating Disorders would be desirable

Qualifications:

Essential

Qualified Systemic Family Psychotherapist registered with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) via the College of Family Couple and Systemic Therapy.

Educated to MSc level in Family Therapies

Desirable

Formal training in the supervision of a psychotherapeutic modality.

Further training in a recognised evidence-based psychological therapy.

Leadership Training

For your hard work and dedication to Priory, we will offer you a wide range of benefits:

• 25 days annual leave (increasing to 27 days after 5 years of service and 30 days after 10 years service)
• Birthday Leave
• Enhanced maternity pay
• Contributory pension scheme
• Opportunities to develop and train in a wide variety of care settings
• Support and training from the beginning of your career
• Flexible working
• Supplemented meals
• Access to Employee Assistant programme and other wellness programmes
• Employee benefits scheme (e.g. discounted shopping vouchers, interest free Apple Products loan scheme)