Principal Practitioner Psychologist | Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust
| Posting date: | 22 July 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | Not specified |
| Additional salary information: | £64,455 - £74,896 Per annum |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 22 August 2025 |
| Location: | Liverpool, L22AH |
| Company: | Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 7368178/350-CC7347816-A |
Summary
Job Purpose:
The Transcend B8b Principal Practitioner Psychologist role is an exciting opportunity to provide clinical leadership to Transcend's expanding psychology team which includes a 1.0 B8a Clinical Psychologist, 2.0 B7/B8a Preceptorship Psychologists, and a Fixed-Term Assistant Psychologist. As clinical lead, you will join a friendly and supportive multidisciplinary team of doctors, nursing staff, and psychologists who support patients from across the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB region who are experiencing gender dysphoria. The role involves leading the psychology team, delivering high quality psychological assessments and and therapy, and clinically supervising and operationally managing (where appropriate) team members. The role also involves being a key member of the MDT, offering psychological consultation and advice to medical and nursing colleagues, and supporting with service developments and initiatives in line with ICB and Trust requirements.
To work in a co-production model, with Transcend's Clinical and Operational leads, providing advice and consultation on service users’ psychological care to non-psychological professions
colleagues and to others involved in the service user’s care, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures.
To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.
To provide teaching and training within the service and to other groups as required.
To line manage psychological professions within the Transcend service, as appropriate.
Mersey Care is one of the largest trusts providing physical health and mental health services in the North West, serving more than 1.4 million people across our region and are also commissioned for services that cover the North West, North Wales and the Midlands.
We offer specialist inpatient and community services that support physical and mental health and specialist inpatient mental health, learning disability, addiction and brain injury services. Mersey Care is one of only three trusts in the UK that offer high secure mental health facilities.
At the heart of all we do is our commitment to ‘perfect care’ – care that is safe, effective, positively experienced, timely, equitable and efficient. We support our staff to do the best job they can and work alongside service users, their families, and carers to design and develop future services together. We’re currently delivering a programme of organisational and service transformation to significantly improve the quality of the services we provide and safely reduce cost as we do so.
Flexible working requests will be considered for all roles.
Clinical
1. To provide highly specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the Transcend Service based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological tests, self-report measures, forensic history, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations, psychodynamic, adult attachment and semi-structured interviews with clients, family members and other involved in the client’s care.
2. To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of clients’ complex mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the clients’ problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficiency, across the full range of care settings.
3. To be responsible for implementing a range of specialised psychological interventions for individuals and groups, within and across teams, adjusting and refining psychological formulations, drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
4. To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models, legal obligations and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individuals, family or group.
5. To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients who problems are managed by
psychologically based standard care plans.
6. To provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals which contributes directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
7. To provide directly and indirectly, a psychologically grounded framework of understanding to guide care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.
8. To ensure that comprehensive risk assessments on all patients within the service are carried out in line with Local Division policy. To contribute to multi-disciplinary diagnostic assessment of complex cases, and to share advice and recommendations.
9. To communicate and record in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni and multidisciplinary care.
10. To revise and manage the referral process and waiting list.
11. To clinically lead on assessment, intervention, evaluation and risk assessment.
12. To line manage psychological professions within the Transcend service, as appropriate
Teaching, Training and Supervision
1. To deliver regular clinical and professional supervision to psychology colleagues.
2. To gain additional highly specialist experience and skills relevant to psychological/nursing needs as agreed with the Divisional Lead for Psychological Professions.
3. To apply and continue to develop skills in the area of professional postgraduate teaching, training supervision and to provide supervision to other MDT staff’s psychological work as appropriate.
4. To provide professional clinical supervision of student and trainee staff and to line manage psychological professions within the Transcend service, as appropriate.
5. To contribute to the pre and post qualification teaching of clinical
psychological/nursing service staff, as appropriate, including the
development of reflective practice interventions, enhanced by PhD. Study outcomes.
6. To provide advice consultation and training to MDT staff working with the client group across a range of agencies and settings, where appropriate
Management, Recruitment and Service Development
1. To line manage psychological services staff working within the Transcend service.
2. To develop and apply professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit to enhance development, evaluation and monitoring of the
multidisciplinary team’s operational policies and services.
3. To advise both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological/nursing and/or organisational matters need addressing.
4. To be involved, as appropriate, in the shortlisting and interviewing of new staff.
Research and Service Evaluation
1. To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence based practice in individual work and work with other team members.
2. To undertake appropriate research and provide research advice to other staff undertaking research.
3. To undertake project management, including complex audit and service evaluation, with colleagues within the service to help develop service
provision.
4. To contribute to the dissemination of any work undertaken by promoting the evidence base and by publishing the work in accredited journal and speaking at relevant conferences/workshops
This advert closes on Sunday 3 Aug 2025