Mbu Assistant Psychologist

Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust provides child and adult mental health services, learning disability, wellbeing, older people's and eating disorder services across Norfolk and Suffolk.

At any one time, around 23,000 people in Norfolk and Suffolk are receiving care and attention from the Trust. We believe in whole life care - seeing people in the context of their whole lives, understanding the importance of good physical health, friends, family, spirituality, culture, home, work, education and a sense of purpose and achievement to experience good mental health.

Nearly 3,200 full and part-time practitioners care for our service users in hospitals, in the community and in their own homes, whilst an additional 900+ staff provide non-clinical support, including cleaning, delivering supplies, ward administration, information technology, human resources and financial services.

We are committed to delivering quality driven mental health services. Every individual makes a valuable contribution. We are proud of our staff who have been commended for the care they provide. Do you value working positively, respectfully and together? If so, we’d love you to join us

***

JOB DESCRIPTION/PERSON SPECIFICATION

YOUR APPLICATION

**Job overview**:
NSFT Children, Families and Young People’s Specialist Services are seeking to recruit a psychology graduate for a full-time, 12 months fixed term assistant psychologist post based at the Kingfisher mother and baby unit, Hellesdon Hospital. Applicants must have excellent literacy and numeracy skills, a psychology degree with 2.1 or above and be eligible for graduate membership of the British Psychological Society.

The Kingfisher unit has 8 beds and offers specialist acute in-patient treatment for mothers who have serious mental illness, in an environment where they can stay with their babies. Mothers have a range of presentations including postpartum psychosis, severe post-natal depression and severe post-natal anxiety. We are the unit for the east of England region and have a full multi-disciplinary team including medics, nurses, nursery nurses, midwives, health visitors, social workers, an occupational therapist, psychologists and a psychological therapist. There are lots of opportunities for multi-disciplinary working and learning about holding both the mother and babies’ needs in mind in our work.

**Main duties of the job**:
The role will involve working with the ward team to deliver psychologically informed interventions, with a focus on short term, intensive individual work alongside some opportunities for group work. All clinical work would be under the guidance and supervision of a qualified clinical psychologist. There would be opportunities for service-related research and audit. The post holder would also need to take the lead on collecting routine outcome measures and using databases to analyse the data collected.

You would receive weekly supervision from a qualified psychologist. As a service we have close links to the clinical psychology doctoral training programme at the UEA and have supported previous assistant psychologists onto clinical training.

**Working for our organisation**:
Benefits included with this role are:

- NHS pension
- a comprehensive in house & external training programmes
- career progression
- starting annual leave of 27 days per annum increasing to 33 days pa based on length of service (plus paid bank holidays)
- staff physio service
- gym membership
- NHS discounts and many more.

**Detailed job description and main responsibilities**:
Please use your supporting statement to detail why you're attracted to the role of assistant psychologist on a Mother and Baby Unit and why you feel you are suited to the role.

**Person specification**:
**Qualifications**:
**Essential criteria**:

- QUALIFICATIONS- Applicants must have Psychology degree with 2:1 or above and be eligible for graduate membership of the British Psychological Society

**EXPERIENCE**:
**Essential criteria**:

- Experience of quantitative research

**Desirable criteria**:

- Experience of research in the NHS

**SKILLS**:
**Essential criteria**:

- Skills using microcomputers for databases or date analysis, especially SPSS for Windows.

**Desirable criteria**:

- Ability to communicate sensitive information to patients and colleagues
- Presentation Skills.

**KNOWLEDGE**:
**Essential criteria**:

- Knowledge of mental health
- Knowledge of quantitative research.
- High standard of report writing.
- An understanding of psychology applied to health care.

**Desirable criteria**:

- An understanding of the needs and difficulties of people with mental health problems or other disabilities.

**OTHER**:
**Essential criteria**:

- An ability to interact effectively with staff from all disciplines.
- An ability to interact with clients with mental health problems
- Ability to work independently, reliably and consistently with work agreed and managed at regular intervals.