HealthJobsUK

Clinical

.     To work with service users and staff of the Probation Service within Probation Service premises including local area offices and Approved Premises.  To work with service users and other professionals in community settings, mainly Probation Delivery Units.  To work with service users and staff in institutional settings including prisons, special hospitals and other secure facilities.

 Working within a highly specialised clinical field to deliver case consultations that help Probation staff understand an individual’s behaviour, presentation and problems.  To deliver case consultations using a psychological framework to develop a provisional hypothesis or theory about the onset, motivation and maintenance factors in relation to the Person on Probation’s behaviour and functioning.  To deliver consultations that help Probation Service staff to predict how an individual will respond to sentencing, treatment and management plans, and provide a rationale for the sequence and dosage of treatment across the entire OPD pathway.

  Working within a highly specialised clinical field to develop case formulations in specific cases in order to help Probation staff develop a deeper understanding of an individual’s behaviour, presentation and problems.  To develop case formulations using a psychological framework to develop a hypothesis or theory about the onset, motivation and maintenance factors in relation to a person’s behaviour and functioning.  To develop formulations that provide testable hypotheses and predict how an individual on Probation will respond to sentencing, treatment and management plans, and provide a rationale for the sequence and dosage of treatment across the entire pathway. 

 To work in partnership with staff employed by the Probation Service to deliver joint case work within the service. To determine suitability for PROSPER (West Midlands IIRMS) via joint case work either face to face in the community, or potentially whilst the service user is still in prison.

  To undertake case consultations and case formulations with individual staff, or with groups of staff, in conjunction with the Probation colleagues.

  To provide highly developed specialist psychological assessments of service users based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources which may include psychological (and neuropsychologicaI[1]) tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with service users, family members and others involved in the service user’s care.

    To support and advise probation staff in developing plans for interventions with, and/or management of, people on Probation with personality difficulties based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, based upon case consultation and/or formulation, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of forensic settings, community and other health settings.  To undertake this work with individual staff or with groups of staff, in conjunction with the Probation colleagues and, if required, in liaison with the Strategic Lead/Consultant Psychologist for the OPD Pathway.

  To work with the SPO and Probation Delivery Unit managers, and to liaise with the Strategic Lead/Consultant Psychologist, in order to develop and implement systematic methods to screen People on Probation to identify those with possible personality difficulties.  The screening method will include implementation of a screening tool and identification of cases based upon sentence type, offence type and identification of indicators of personality disorder.

     If required, to be responsible for implementing highly specialist psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, to service users of the Probation Service, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.

   To exercise full responsibility and autonomy for the treatment and discharge of service users whose problems are managed with a psychologically based care plan, ensuring appropriate assessment, formulation and interventions, communicating with the referral agent and others involved with the care on a regular basis.

   To provide expertise and specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to service users’ formulation, diagnosis, management and treatment plan. 

   To routinely work with service users who have been perpetrators and/or victims of serious offences and/or who show severely challenging behaviour.  This includes violent and sexual offences.  To maintain a high level of professionalism despite regular exposure to highly emotive, distressing and disturbing material including first and second hand accounts of serious offences.

   To undertake risk assessment and risk management for relevant individual service users, providing formal reports and consultancy/advice to multi-disciplinary teams and external agencies.  Where necessary, to undertake weekly, daily or minute-by-minute assessment of the risk a client poses to him/herself, the post-holder and others.  To provide both general and specialist advice for psychologists and other professionals on psychological aspects of risk assessment and management.

   To ensure the development, maintenance and dissemination of the highest professional standards of practice, through active participation in internal and external CPD training and development programmes.

 To supervise other applied psychologist(s), including Assistant Psychologists and clinical or forensic psychology trainees.

 To support the identification of the training needs of NHS and HMPPS colleagues working in the CORE-OM Service.