Clinical Psychologist/Forensic Psychologist/Counselling Psychologist

Transformationunitgm; Enfield; On-site; GBP 56,000 - 64,000; Full time

Job summary

A major NHS trust in London is looking for a Band 7 Clinical Psychologist to join their mental health service within HMP Brixton. The role involves providing psychological assessments and therapeutic interventions to prisoners and working collaboratively within a multidisciplinary team. Candidates will need a Doctoral level qualification in Clinical Psychology or equivalent, with experience in forensic settings being advantageous. This position offers opportunities for professional development and making impactful contributions to mental health care.

Benefits

NHS Discounts

Generous annual leave

NHS pension scheme

Health and wellbeing initiatives

Qualifications

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment and treatment in various care settings.
• Experience of working with diverse client groups, maintaining professionalism under stress.
• Experience in a forensic setting, ideally in a prison environment.

Responsibilities

• Provide specialist psychological assessments and therapy to clients.
• Support the therapies team to meet operational policy and integrated pathways.
• Act as care coordinator, managing planning and review of care plans.

Skills

Psychological assessment

Therapeutic interventions

Autonomy

Collaboration in multidisciplinary teams

Teaching and training

Research skills

Education

Doctoral level training in Clinical Psychology

Doctoral or Master's level training in Forensic Psychology

Training in working with neurodiversity

Job description

Employer North London NHS Foundation Trust Employer type NHS Site HMP Brixton Town London Salary £56,276 - £63,176 Per annum including HCAS Salary period Yearly Closing 15/01/2026 23:59

Clinical Psychologist/Forensic Psychologist/Counselling Psychologist

NHS AfC: Band 7

Thank you for your interest in the North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT). This is an exciting time to join us and be part of our journey to improve mental health care across North London and deliver excellent services to our local people. We will achieve this through the North London Way, as we:

• Collaborate at every level by living our values to create the right conditions for us all to work together.
• Develop our new Trust culture, to help make our new Trust a great place to work and to receive great care.
• Empower our teams to lead the planned improvements in our services, by skilling them and giving them the tools to make the changes.
• Focus on delivering excellence at every level to improve our performance and ensure consistently high-quality care across all our services.
• Ensure that research, quality improvement, and technology lead the way and are embedded in our services.
• Take a trauma informed approach to everything we do

We proactively welcome diversity in our workforce and pride ourselves on being an inclusive employer. We aim to recruit from our local communities and provide opportunities to all including apprenticeships, veterans, care leavers and more.

The North London Way to deliver: Better Mental Health, Better Lives, Better Communities.

We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic band 7 clinical psychologist to a permanent post within our friendly and high experienced talking therapies service in HMP Brixton. Psychology is closely integrated within the wider multidisciplinary mental health hub, which includes psychiatry, nursing, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. The post-holder will provide assessment and therapeutic interventions (individual and group), working directly with prisoners and staff, and also indirectly through liaison and consultation with the multidisciplinary team and other professionals (i.e. prison officers, safer custody, probation etc.). The post will also include working on the development of a new 8-bed in-patient unit within the prison. The successful candidate will have an opportunity to directly contribute to these service developments as well as developing research and service evaluation initiatives.

Some previous experience of working in restrictive settings would be an advantage but we would also welcome applications from enthusiastic newly qualified psychologists.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will be required to support the delivery of care currently in the form of Integrated Care Pathways, enabling the service to meet the London Wide service specification standards for Prison Healthcare.

The post holder will support the therapies team to ensure they work to an agreed operational policy and offer integrated triage, assessment and intervention to individuals within our prison settings who are presenting with mental health problems in line with the Integrated Care Pathways.

To provide a qualified specialist psychology service to patients under the care of the Mental Health team, Therapies service and inpatient unit within the Prison. The role includes providing specialist psychological assessment and therapy, at the same time as offering advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures. To provide supervision to unqualified psychology staff and to support senior staff to further develop the service. To utilise research skills for audit, policy, service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

Working for our organisation

North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) is committed to improving mental health care across North London to deliver excellent services to our local people.

• We will provide consistently high-quality care closer to home.
• With our partners in North London and each borough we will ensure equity of outcome for all
• We will offer great places to work, providing staff with supportive environment to deliver outstanding care

Why NLFT?

• We develop and retain our staff through leadership behaviours and managers programme and many more opportunities.
• We promote flexible working and support staff with a range of health and wellbeing initiatives.
• NHS Discounts, generous annual leave and NHS pension scheme
• Excellent internal staff network

In order to meet the needs of the Trust you may be required from time to time to work at different locations to your normal place of work. This may mean that you are required to work at any location that fall under Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey or Islington. The Trust reserves the right to require staff to work at such other places or locations as it considers reasonable and necessary on a temporary or permanent basis.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Clinical:

• To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the team based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with clients, family members and others involved in the client’s care
• To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems or behavioural difficulties based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings
• To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses
• To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family or group.
• 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 (including in-patient settings
• 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 act as care coordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans under CPA including clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved the network of care.

Consultation, Teaching, Training, and Supervision

• To provide consultation and training to other professionals within the unit developing understanding of psychological interventions; which will assist with day-to-day clinical practice.
• To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues.
• To gain additional highly specialist experience and skills relevant to clinical psychology and/or the service (as agreed with the service manager and professional psychology manager) .
• To develop skills in the area of professional post-graduate teaching, training and supervision and to provide supervision to other MDT staff’s psychological work as appropriate.
• To provide professional and clinical supervision of junior members of the department including qualified staff and trainees.
• To contribute to the pre- and post-qualification teaching of clinical, counselling and/or forensic psychology, as appropriate.
• To provide advice, consultation and training to staff working with the client group across a range of agencies and settings, where appropriate.

Person specification

Qualifications

• Doctoral level training in Clinical Psychology OR Doctoral or Masters level training in forensic psychology with full competencies completed OR Doctoral training in Counselling Psychology
• Additional training in working with neurodiversity (e.g. ADOS, ADIR)

Experience

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment and treatment of clients across a range of care settings, which can include outpatient, community, primary care and inpatient settings.
• Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups and maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of emotive and distressing problems and where there is a history of violence.
• Experience of working within a forensic setting/service (ideally prison environment) either in a B7 role, or as a trainee.
• Experience of teaching, training and providing supervision/consultation to other professional groups

Experience

• Able to contain, explore and formulate an understanding of high levels of distress both directly with patients and indirectly via supervision or case reviews with other staff.
• Flexible, engaging and approachable who can work quickly and responsively with both clients and the multidisciplinary team.
• Experience of working with neurodiversity and previous experience of assessing and working with autistic adults, ADHD and /or intellectual disabilities
• Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.

References will be required to cover your last 3 years of employment/training. One has to be from your current or most recent employer and the others from your previous employer. The references should be from persons with management responsibility or HR.

If you have been unemployed for a period of four years or more, please give the details of your last employer and one character referee of your choice (not members of your family). If more applicable, references will be requested from your teacher or head of faculty. Please ensure you provide full contact details.

Vacancies that are advertised as Fixed Term Contracts will also be available as secondment opportunities for substantive internal staff.

Please be aware that your documents eg. Passport/NI Card, will be electronically scanned using Home Office accredited Verification System.

Due to the high number of applications that are received for some posts, we will close vacancies before the stated closing date once the first 50 applications are received. Therefore, please apply as soon as possible.

All non-medical posts with the Trust are subject to a probationary period of six months, during which time you will be required to demonstrate to the Trust’s satisfaction, your suitability for the position in which you will be employed.

Should you not hear from us within three working weeks of the closing date for this post, then regretfully in this instance, you have not been shortlisted.

By applying for this role, you accept in the event you are successful that your personal data may be transferred from the Trust to another NHS organisation where your employment transfers within the NHS. This is in accordance with the streamlining programme which is aimed at improving efficiencies within the NHS both to make costs savings for NHS organisations but also to save you time when your employment transfers.

Employer certification / accreditation badges

You must have appropriate UK professional registration.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Name Jarrod Cabourne Job title Therapies Lead/Lead Clinical Psychologist Email address [e-mail]