Principal Clinical/Counselling Psychologist/Psychological Therapist

Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust

The closing date is 14 April 2025

Job summary

This post offers an exciting opportunity for a Highly Specialist Psychological Therapist with an interest in working with people with an offending history and complex personality difficulties to take a lead role in implementing the London Pathways Partnership (LPP) strategic plan. The London Pathways Partnership (LPP) is a partnership of five NHS Trusts co-delivering Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) services with HMPPS colleagues, across several prisons in the Southeast of England and pan-London in the community.

The OPD Pathway programme provides services to men and women with complex psychological difficulties and serious offending histories, and to the multi-agency professionals working with them. Oxleas is the LPP Lead NHS Trust and will be the host trust for this position.

Main duties of the job

The LPP Strategic Workforce Lead will establish a task and finishgroup to develop a plan to meet the strategic objectives of the LPP steering group. This includes improving diverse recruitment and retention, ensuring all LPP services have an annual training strategy, and a staff wellbeing survey in the context of working with complex service participants in the criminal justice system. The group will evaluate the workforce development workstream, and develop an accompanying guidance document, to include a pathway for forensic and clinical trainee psychologists and a pathway to diversify the race and ethnicity of the LPP workforce to better represent the racial and ethnic distribution of our service participants.

See attached Job Description for a full list of duties.

About us

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
We Listen
We Care

Date posted

31 March 2025

Pay scheme

Agenda for change

Band

Band 8b

Salary

£70,387 to £80,465 a year pro rata pa inc

Contract

Fixed term

Duration

6 months

Working pattern

Part-time

Reference number

277-7080572-FOR

Job locations

LPP Community Premises

7 Holyrood Street

London

SE1 2EL

Job description

Job responsibilities

Management responsibilities

To line manage and supervise psychological therapists, lived experience practitioners and pre-qualified psychological therapists who are directly employed by the London Pathways Partnership, and to liaise with the line managers of those employed in split posts.

To develop service user involvement and lived experience practitioner roles in the service.

To interpret policies and guidance for application in the London Pathways Partnership and be responsible for policy implementation.

Responsibility for quality and performance of the London Pathways Partnerships Workforce Development Group, overseeing completion of quarterly and annual monitoring reports as well as clinical audits, where relevant to the role.

To exercise responsibility for the systematic governance of psychological practice within the London Pathways Partnerships Workforce Development Group.

To be responsible to the operational lead for workforce planning, including staff engagement, fair recruitment, professional appraisal and staff continuing professional development activities.

To work closely with the administrator, psychological therapists and operational leads to ensure there are efficient administrative systems in place to effectively manage referrals, waiting lists, and recording of clinical activity and outcomes.

To support the budget holder for the service to manage the specialty within the specified budget.

To initiate audit, policy and service development and research activities within the service to ensure the delivery of a reflexive, high quality and financially efficient service with a sound basis in evidence-based treatment and best clinical practice.

To interpret policies and guidance for application in the service and be responsible for policy development and implementation

To initiate, implement and ensure appropriate service developments to improve the quality and delivery of services in the service and in partner services.

To ensure the consultation and engagement of service users in planning and delivering services which meet the needs of local communities.

To participate in, or lead when appropriate, Trust and Directorate strategic development and implementation of new initiatives (e.g. national guidelines), through membership of committees and/or working parties.

In partnership with professional and operational leads, to be responsible for service development and expansion, following best practice policy and guidance and local organisational priorities and to lead on service innovation and evaluation.

To be responsible for setting and implementing clinical governance standards within the service and ensure that these are maintained and improved.

To take a lead role in ensuring that services to clients are of a high quality and are managed efficiently, according to the overall requirements of the Trust, NHS and government guidance and standards.