This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced psychologist to join our team of diverse, talented healthcare professionals to deliver care that is not only efficient but deeply centred on the patient.
Our healthcare teams have a real impact on promoting health and well-being to those in prison and we pride ourselves on using skills and strategies that instil hope for patient’s future resettlement back into the community. Our Psychological Therapies department is an unusually large, long established and nationally well regarded specialty. Psychologists are highly valued within the trust and occupy a variety of service-wide leadership roles. The Psychological Therapies team is warm and friendly, whilst also being dynamic and innovative.
Join us in a stimulating role where we are seeking a dynamic and passionate experienced psychologist who has the skills required to develop a trauma-informed care service across three prisons.
The successful applicant will be able to demonstrate a keen interest in prison mental health as part of a multi-disciplinary team, consulting on and promoting psychological and trauma informed approaches to understanding and working with this population. Candidates will be qualified psychologists with post-qualification experience. Previous experience in forensic settings would be beneficial.
This post is based within the mental health team across three Dorset prisons, HMP’s Guys Marsh, Portland and The Verne. You would be providing senior leadership and oversight of a range of psychological therapies across the prison’s, ensuring these are safely and effectively delivered by you and your team of specialist psychologists and multi-professional mental health in-reach colleagues. You will contribute actively to service development, including culturally appropriate services for people of differing ethnicity and socio-economic status. You will work closely with director-level colleagues, commissioners and prison governors to design and implement a trauma informed model of care.
You will supervise qualified psychologists who will supervise other psychological therapists to apply the NICE stepped care model and lead on trauma informed consultation activity with both operational and clinical staff. There is a focus on attachment, trauma and systemic approaches with expert supervision provided for several evidence-based therapy modalities such as Cognitive Analytic Therapy, Mentalisation based Therapy (MBT) and Eye Movement Desensitisation therapy (EMDR). There would be an expectation the post holder would carry a small caseload and carry out psychological assessment and therapy with complex individual and groups of prisoners.
Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.
We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.
Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families. This is strengthened by our new values:
• We’re Kind
• We’re Fair
• We Listen
• We Care
· To provide direct psychological care (assessment and intervention) and support the delivery of psychologically informed care by all disciplines within the service.
· To provide highly specialist psychological therapy assessments, formulations and interventions.
· To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of community clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans, including taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans with input from clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved in the network of care.
· To provide culturally appropriate psychological therapy interventions with service suers, carers or families of referred clients when required.
· To communicate, in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, to clients, family carers and others as appropriate, information that may be contentious or highly distressing concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care.
· To produce reports on clients, in a timely manner, that convey the key findings of psychological assessment and formulation and treatment outcome in a way that does justice to the complexity of the problems described, but that are understandable to the recipients of the reports, including clients and referrers.
· To undertake psychometric and neuropsychological testing as appropriate, including selecting the appropriate tests, administering and scoring the tests in accordance with the manual, and interpreting the findings in the context of all relevant information.
· To undertake risk assessment, risk monitoring and risk management for individual clients in line with Trust and inter-agency policies and procedures, and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.
· To work in partnership with other disciplines and to maintain links with statutory and non-statutory agencies as appropriate.
· Attend and contribute to directorate level meetings and forums, as directed.
· Contribute to the delivery of accessible and acceptable services to diverse communities.
· To be proactive in challenging discrimination.
· To advise other colleagues on specialist psychological care of clients.
· To liaise with referrers, GPs and other professionals concerned with clients in order to develop and review care plans.
· To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence-based practice in individual work and work with other team members.
· To liaise with the service/s MDT and other professionals.
· Implement relevant policies and procedures for the safe running of the service.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION, PLEASE READ:
All applicants must be willing to undertake National Security Vetting in order to work in a Prison Setting. This will be completed as part of the pre-employment checks through Oxleas and the prison vetting team.
You will need to provide:
Proof of right to work documentation
Proof of ID, needs to include 1 photographic ID
Proof of address documentation
Non-UK passport holders will need to have correct documentation (right to work in the UK) and a Home office Share code.
Address History:
5 years address history will be needed.
Applicants that are not UK Passport holders who provide less than 5 years UK address history will need to provide a Police Certificate which must be in English from where they resided previously.
Applicants who are UK Passport holders who have lived abroad for a period of more than six months during the last three years will need to provide a certificate of good conduct or an overseas police check in English from the countries resided in or visited.
In order to assist you in obtaining a Police Certificate, guidance can be sought from:
If the country you have resided in is not listed here, you can obtain the necessary information by contacting the relevant Embassy or High Commission for that Country. Their contact details can be found on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office website (
This advert closes on Wednesday 26 Mar 2025
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