Assistant Psychologist

Job summary

The service is looking to recruit an Assistant Psychologist to work across Adult Eating Disorder services. The service provides specialist eating disorder services to adults living in County Durham and Teesside who experience severe eating disorders. We deliver services across community, day service and inpatient settings to fit with the needs of individuals. Our community and day services are based at Imperial Avenue Norton, Stockton on Tees, whilst the regional inpatient unit is located at Birch Ward, West Park Hospital, Darlington. The successful candidate would be expected to work between these bases during the working week. Experience of working in an Inpatient setting is essential.

As well as formal supervision and learning opportunities this post provides excellent opportunities for exposure and informal learning and support from a range of Psychological professionals who cover our services including Clinical and Counselling Psychologists, An Art Psychotherapist and Nurse Therapists trained in approaches such as systemic practice, IPT, MANTRA and EMDR. You will also have the opportunity to work closely with other Health Professionals such as Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Dieticians and Psychiatry. We are excited to be implementing Peer Support roles in our services in 2024.

Main duties of the job

A large part of the role will be to support our service users to complete Psychometrics, and other assessment tools that help us to understand people's needs and play an important part in the evaluation of our services. You would be responsible to collecting, inputting and producing reports interpreting this day

The post holder will also be supported to deliver psychologically informed interventions under the close supervision of a qualified psychologist. This may be 1 to 1 with individual or through supporting the delivery of our group programme.

It is an exciting time for Eating Disorder Services so there is significant service development work happening in our services at present as we seek to improve the services we deliver to our communities. It is envisaged the Assistant Psychologist will be able to gain experience of supporting this work once settled in their role,.

Psychologists & Psychological Therapists provide key leadership roles within the Trust. To support this we have developed leadership profiles for each psychology band and the profile card associated with this post is attached on NHS Jobs. You can find more information about the NHS Leadership Academy's Healthcare Leadership Model and the profiles at their website. We encourage you to look at these resources as they will play a part in the interview process.

About us

We're committed to co-creating a great experience for our colleagues. This means listening to what staff are telling us and working together to be the best employer we can be.

Our staff are our most important asset and recognising their excellent work and the vital contributions they make to patient care is very important.

We have achieved the gold Investors in People (IIP) standard and have been commended on great people management practice and demonstrating a commitment to staff development.

We are signed up to the Disability Confident Scheme. This means we have to demonstrate that we're taking positive action to attract, recruit and retain disabled people

We have an award-winning system for delivering efficiency through clinician-led quality improvements.

All staff who join us are provided with a comprehensive induction programme, starting on their first day of employment.

Continuous professional development is important to us. Once you're comfortable in your new role, you and your manager will work collaboratively to form a Personal Development Plan (PDP), your personal career aspirations are taken into account and the trust will provide you with the resources you need to develop.

It's important our staff are able to raise concerns about patient safety and let us know when we need to improve services. We have a number of ways people can do this.