Professional Lead for Mother & Baby Unit (MBU) Clinical / Psychologist

at  Devon Partnership NHS Trust

Duties and Responsibilities Communication and Working Relationship Skills Clients, Family and Carers: To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner with clients who may have specific difficulties in understanding and/or communicating and who may be hostile, antagonistic or highly emotionally disturbed. Able to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS. Multidisciplinary Team Colleagues: To work closely with colleagues in the multi-professional service on a day to day basis. To motivate and lead staff in developing and changing practice and communicate complex information and support staff who may be anxious or hostile about systems changes.
To ensure the team is knowledgeable about and has good lines of communication with key local services. Health & Social Care Staff: To communicate with a wide range of health & social care staff in hospital and in community settings in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, complex and sensitive information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under the services care. To provide support & guidance in the application of psychological principles and techniques, and to foster reflective practice. Senior Managers & Professional Staff: To maintain and build good working relationships with senior professional staff and managers across the Perinatal service, all clinical directorates and the organisation as a whole, to foster a positive approach to the perinatal service and to enable effective negotiation.
To be able to effectively collaborative working across different levels of the organisations, across staff groups and with other agencies. Analytical and Judgemental Skills To be a Professional Lead with responsibility for day to day management of staff and coordinating the smooth running of the MBU. To provide specialist psychological expertise and advice. To provide psychological therapies, develop specialist psychological formulations and assessments of clients, formulate plans for their psychological treatment and implement specialist psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups.
To support the General Manager and Strategic Leads in Specialist Services by undertaking service development and redesign projects and coordinating the resulting work within the team. Proposing and implementing policy changes within this domain and taking a lead in locality service redesign. Responsibility for Patient/Client Care, Treatment and Therapy To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the service based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses. To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a clients mental health problems and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy.
To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, infants, carers, families and groups, within and across teams. To administer psychometric and neuropsychological tests requiring high levels of skill and accuracy in visual discrimination of client responses, manipulating test materials whilst observing and scoring client behaviour. To work within the parameters and protocols of the service as an autonomous professional practitioner with responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients. To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management. To clinically lead on parent-infant interventions within the Perinatal Care Pathway. Planning and Organisational Skills The Perinatal Psychology Service: To plan and organise the work of the Psychology Service within the service setting and to contribute to the development and improvement of provision of psychological services within the commissioned perinatal mental health service to best meet the organisations strategy and priorities.
The Multidisciplinary Service: To provide psychology leadership to the multi-professional planning, development and marketing of perinatal mental health services. The Directorate: To work with Strategic Leads in Specialist Directorate to contribute to the planning and implementation of service developments across the Specialist Services Directorate

Please refer the Job description for details