Band 7 Arts psychotherapist - Wiltshire

• This substantive post is available part-time for 15 hours per week.
• Applications are invited from appropriately accredited (HCPC, UKCP), qualified and experienced Arts Psychotherapists for a permanent community Arts Psychotherapy post based with the West Wiltshire Community Mental Health Team.
• You will be joining a supportive and experienced team of Arts Psychotherapists, an Art Therapy Assistant, Psychologists, CBT Therapists, and Assistant Psychologists working across Wiltshire, embedded within the Wiltshire Psychological Therapies Service. We bring additional experience in CAT, CFT, MBT, DBT, CBT and EMDR. The team offers a range of group and individual creative psychological treatments across the Wiltshire Community Health Teams, the Inpatient Service at Green Lane Hospital, Devizes and Fountain Way, Salisbury. We are a creative team who work hard to actively support psychologically informed environments, and offer reflective practice groups and clinical supervision for staff.
• Main duties of the job

You will be able to demonstrate knowledge of working with a number of different client groups in secondary mental health settings, and of having been responsible for providing assessments and focused psychological interventions.

You will work as an autonomous clinical practitioner and with clinical teams, planning and providing a psychological therapies service within your own area of practice, providing highly specialist arts psychotherapy treatment and ongoing evaluation.

A broad range of psychological models are used within the team and we would particularly value further training in additional specific therapies such as EMDR, MBT, CFT, or other therapeutic approaches in the treatment of relational trauma. You will have experience in working with complex trauma and severe mental health issues.

Working for our organisation

We are AWP (Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust): a diverse organisation with over 5,000 dedicated staff providing inpatient and community-based mental health care.

We provide services from a range of locations to approximately 1.8 million people living in Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES), Bristol, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Swindon, across the county of Wiltshire and in parts of Dorset.

Our outstanding people promote mental health and wellbeing. The expertise and resources within AWP are dedicated to a person-centred approach for those who use our services and for all employees. We recognise that happy and fulfilled employees give better care.

AWP is committed to support and create a positive research and evidence-based environment and culture, which can have a beneficial impact on everyone who works for the organisation and the care we provide to those who use our services.

At AWP we actively encourage applicants from all backgrounds; we are particularly keen to encourage applications from people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, those with disabilities and from the LGBTQ+ community. We want people to bring their unique blend of experiences, backgrounds, perspectives and knowledge to AWP, as diversity makes us stronger.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Clinical Services

To provide a specialist arts psychotherapy service including assessment and treatment, using advanced levels of skill, for individual and group therapy and to advise teams in relation to service users complex needs and the range of interventions available.

To carry out assessments and consultation to inform and enable comprehensive information gathering, helping to establish formulations, regarding service users who present with unclear symptoms and complex mental health difficulties.

Regularly review and evaluate the therapy including levels of risk on line with the CMHTs processes.

Communicate with empathy and sensitivity with service users and carers with an awareness and understanding of their problems and often complex issues.

To be responsible for own specialist caseload working within Trust policies, protocols and guidelines.

To record service user’s progress in RIO patient records, write reports and input statistical data.

To engage in reflective practice and clinical supervision and to offer clinical supervision to arts psychotherapy staff and other colleagues, as required. To arrange and attend professional, team and specialist clinical supervision as appropriate to caseload.

Professional:

• To communicate effectively with members of clinical teams, managers and other professional colleagues both representing and providing an arts psychotherapy perspective.

Work with Managers and Locality Leads to ensure that all new, current or adapted arts psychotherapy spaces/rooms conform to professional Associations standards and Standards for Better Health, and provide an adequate, appropriate and safe therapeutic environment in which to practice.

• To be responsible for ensuring that all arts works and digital images and recordings are appropriately stored in line with HCPC, professional associations guidelines and Trust policy.

Clinical Governance:

• To support the AWP and other health colleagues in the development of the psychological therapies service through the implementation of effective Clinical Governance within the remit of the role.

Person specification

Appropriate accreditation

• HCPC or UKCP registration
• NHS experience
• Experience of working with adults with complex presentations and trauma
• Experience of assessing and managing risk

• Additional training in other therapeutic modalities

This includes people with a variety of disabilities and neurodivergent conditions (for example autism, ADHD, sensory, physical and learning disabilities).

We encourage applications from people who wish to work on a flexible basis, recognising that flexibility may mean a range of different working patterns and hours, we do our utmost to work with our staff to meet their needs and the needs of our service users.

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Please apply to join us, we would love to hear from you. Any personal details you supply to us are kept safe in line with the General Data Protection Regulations.

Adverts normally close for application a few minutes before midnight on the closing date and we will let you know if we are offering you an interview by email via our recruitment system ‘TRAC’. We contact all applicants within 4 weeks after the closing date, so please check your emails regularly once you have submitted your application; you are welcome to contact us, via the TRAC system, if you have any queries about your application.

Please note the use of AI is monitored and if you have used it in your application you are required to declare this.