Assistant Psychologist ​/ Research Assistant Complex Emotional Needs

Assistant Psychologist
Split Post 3 days a week as an Assistant Psychologist and 2 days a week as a Research Assistant.

This is an exciting opportunity for excellent people who are passionate about creating positive changes for people described as experiencing Complex Emotional Needs'.

We are a close and supportive multi-disciplinary team and we're proud of our work, making small sustainable changes in service responses across Gloucestershire.

We have 6 main projects that we deliver within the CEN service that an assistant psychologist would be able to be involved with. All of our work in underpinned by co-production, being trauma informed and working alongside colleagues with lived experience.

The successful candidate would mostly support the team in the delivery of the Open Access Therapeutic Support service and would have two days a week dedicated to helping evaluate that service. This would involve data analysis and working with the people who use the service to co-produce their own outcome measures. You would also support structured interviews and analysis to help measure the success of the service.

The ambition is to complete a research paper by the end of the 12-month contract.

The role will mainly involve supporting the Open Access Therapeutic Support service that operates three times a week in Gloucester and is currently expanding to online.

Working with the CEN team will also give opportunity to work with a multi-disciplinary team all committed to improving experiences of receiving service across the county for people experiencing complex emotional needs. (See below for details of projects.)

The role will split into having a dedicated research focus for two days a week, under the guidance of the lead psychologist.

The qualification, training & experience requirements for the role are underlined in the Job Description/Person Specification

We have a skilled and dedicated workforce of over 5000 colleagues working in a diverse range of services over 55 sites and within people's homes. We strive to enable a welcoming workplace culture that builds and celebrates civility, inclusivity and diversity, while providing a sense of belonging and trust.

Annual staff surveys, regular Pulse surveys and other engagement opportunities provide our people with lots of opportunity to tell us about their experiences of working with us. In the latest staff survey, 61% of colleagues gave us their views. It was great to hear that:

• 72% of colleagues would recommend the Trust as a place to work, ranking us 1st for Provider Trusts in the South West region on this question.
• 76% would recommend the standard of care provided in our services if a friend or relative needed treatment, also ranking us 1st in the South West region.
• 81% said that care of patients and service users is the Trust's priority, compared with an average in comparable NHS Trusts in England of 64%.

This high-level overview shows we are in a healthy position, with higher scores than average for comparable organisations, alongside a great response rate, indicating good staff engagement. However, we also know we have plenty of room for improvement in many areas. To that end, we continue to prioritise and invest in our commitment to genuinely becoming a Great Place to Work with consistent top-quartile performance in the annual staff survey and Pulse surveys.

The projects delivered by our service are:

OATS
- Open Access Therapeutic Support
. A peer-therapy group co-delivered with a voluntary care sector partner. We facilitate this group 3 times a week and have weekly clinical supervision to allow us to skilfully draw on psychological theory to enable the group to be safe, effective and therapeutic.

Family and Friends - We offer psychoeducation to families within a 12 week peer group and one to one where indicated.

FERN
- Frequent Engagement Response Network, a small sub-team within CEN. This focusses on improving responses to people presenting regularly to 999 services. The FERN team includes a serving police officer, an assistant psychologist and a lived experience practitioner who work together to create person centred, psychologically informed plans that direct…