QR code linking to this job posting Senior Assistant Psychologist in Northampton inNorthampton PUBLISHED SUN 13 APR 2025

The Northants Personality Disorder Hub is a countywide specialist service that works to enhance understanding of personality disorder and promote the delivery of effective interventions across community and inpatient services. The service provides a Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) programme, DBT to adolescents (DBT-A), leads on the delivery of Structured Clinical Management (SCM) across general secondary mental health services and delivers numerous Understanding and Managing Emotions (U&ME) groups.

This is a split role across the DBT-A and U&ME sub teams delivering a countywide service.

DBT-A works with young people and their families to value and manage emotion, impact their wider environment, and help move them closer to their goals. Our DBT-A includes multi-family group skills training and family involvement and works in collaboration with Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Adult Mental Health Services

U&ME is an 18-session group-based skills programme that aims to help individuals to learn a broader range of strategies for managing their emotions and be more effective in relationships. The group uses DBT materials and was developed to meet the needs of individuals who would have traditionally fallen through the gap between primary and secondary care services.

The successful candidate will be supported in their role by colleagues within the Personality Disorder Hub, being line-managed and supervised by the specialist service, attending & contributing to professional development activities within the Hub, and co-delivering group interventions and staff training with other members of the team.

The post holders will work within a multidisciplinary team to:

  • Provide assessment to clarify service users’ presenting difficulties and suitability for the programmes.
  • Provide lead facilitation of group sessions alongside another member of the Multidisciplinary Team (MDT)
  • Collaborate in using outcome information to inform and develop good practice and review individuals’ progress on completing the programme.
  • Help develop systems and audit projects to allow any data collected to inform Trust management, commissioners, users and other relevant stakeholders of the needs of this population.
  • Contribute to further service development that will aim to promote early identification of personality difficulties, help service users to access to the most appropriate interventions available across the pathway, and enable referring service colleagues to promote the use of effective coping strategies within their own short-term interventions.

NHFT is an integrated primary care and mental health Trust, providing physical, mental health and specialty services in both hospital settings and out in the community. Because we put the person at the centre of all we do, we focus on delivering care that is as easy to access as possible. This means many of our services can be provided at home, work or in schools. We also provide health services to various prisons and detention centres in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire.

NHFT promotes a culture of learning to improve the care and safety of our patients and staff, which focuses on people who enable our Trust to be ‘outstanding’ by supporting opportunity, innovation, development and growth.

For further details / informal visits contact: Name: Kirsty Myers Job title: U&ME Service Manager Email address: Telephone number:

We encourage informal discussions prior to application. If you would like to take up this opportunity, please contact Kirsty Myers (U&ME Service Manager) or Colleen Friday (Clinical Psychologist & DBT-A Lead) on . We plan to interview on Friday 16th May.