Senior Assistant Psychologist

NHFT has an established Maternal Loss Psychology Service which has expanded in line with the Long-Term Plan for Mental Health.
We have an exciting opportunity for a Band 5 Assistant Psychologist to join the Maternal Loss Psychology Service to support and enhance the professional psychological care of clients within the service; providing psychological assessment and psychological interventions under the supervision of a qualified Clinical Psychologist. You will be working independently according to a plan agreed with a Qualified Psychologist and within the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures. You will assist in clinically related administration, conduct audits, collect statistics, develop audit/and or research projects, teaching and project work. Psychological interventions are provided on both a group and 1.1 basis and include Compassion Focused Therapy, CBT, EMDR and IPT. Both remote and face-to-face interventions are available.
Following a period of induction and training within the specialist perinatal mental health service, the main clinical work undertaken by the post-holder will be to support and enhance the professional psychological care of clients within the service; providing psychological assessment and psychological interventions under the supervision of a qualified professional Psychologist. You will be working independently according to a plan agreed with a qualified Psychologist and within the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures. You will assist in clinically related administration, conduct audits, collect statistics, develop audit/and or research projects, teaching and project work. Psychological interventions are provided on both a group and 1.1 basis and include compassion focused therapy, CBT, EMDR and IPT. Both remote and face-to-face interventions are available. The post holder will work within Multi-disciplinary team discussions throughout the service and will work within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the teams’ policies and procedures. They will utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the service.
NHFT is committed to building a diverse workforce, ensuring staff are treated fairly at work and ensuring all staff have the learning and development they need on equality in order to undertake their job role.
We aim to use monitoring information provided by our staff and by job applicants to ensure that we do not discriminate in employment and to use this information to plan any Positive Action to address inequality.
NHFT supports three staff equality networks to help us to develop our equality practice, as well as providing peer support for staff. These are:
NHFT Staff Disability & Allies Network / NHFT BME Staff Development Network / NHFT LGBT & Allies Network
Please refer to the attached job description.
Knowledge and experience of perinatal mental health condition and treatment approaches for working with people with personality difficulties is desirable but not essential. A keen interest and passion for working with women and their families is a must, as is the ability to work closely with a range of professionals. You must demonstrate some awareness of and interest in perinatal working, however, previous experience of directly working in perinatal service is not essential.
There will be opportunities for further training via local and regional delivered training programmes. We have strong links with the East Midlands Regional Perinatal Network. The post holder will also be expected to contribute to the development of a locally agreed programme that delivers training to health and social care professionals in Northamptonshire.
All our clinical psychology team have completed specialist Perinatal Clinical Psychology Training provided by NHSE
We are looking for assistant psychologists with an interest in working with women/birthing people experiencing perinatal mental health conditions including post-natal depression, post-partum psychosis and maternal OCD. This is a multi-disciplinary service with lots of opportunities for joint working and service development.
The service has also been selected as one of 10 Early Implementer sites to deliver a Maternal Mental Health Service (MMHS) which is a psychology lead provision.