Consultant Psychiatrist - Fixed Term

This is an exciting opportunity for a Consultant Psychiatrist to join our Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Service in North West Sussex (Team base Crawley) providing leadership to deliver high-quality, person-centred care to women and birthing people and birthing people in Sussex. This is an established post. The post has become available due to provide fixed term maternity cover for a period of 12 months.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will work as part of the perinatal mental health team providing specialist perinatal community mental health services for a delivered population of 4119 in North-West Sussex.

The service is commissioned to see the 10% of the delivered population, identified by midwives, GPs, obstetricians and mental health colleagues as being potentially at high risk of perinatal-related mental disorder or who suffer serious mental illness in the perinatal period. The service focus is on relapse prevention, early detection and treatment in women and birthing people and birthing people with pre-existing history of severe mental illness.

Referrals to the perinatal teams are roughly two thirds antenatal one third postnatal and come primarily from maternity services (midwives and obstetricians), GPs and Health Visitors. Daily triage takes place via a duty nurse system and weekly referral triage meetings for all new referrals are held within the teams. Urgent referrals meeting service criteria are offered assessment within 5 working days, non-urgent within 20 working days.

About us

The post-holder will provide clinical leadership for the Specialist Perinatal Mental Health team alongside 5 other consultant psychiatrists, Dr Jenny Cooke Dr Michael Harris, Dr Michael Rutherford, Dr Alex Joy and Dr Saleema Durgahee. This vacancy has arisen due to a substantive consultant taking maternity leave.

This post completes the medical establishment of the team providing a minimum of 4.8 whole time equivalent Consultant Psychiatrists for the specialist perinatal MH service.

Job responsibilities

Please see job description for outlines of the main duties and responsibilities of this post. Candidates will be assessed according to the extent to which they meet the specification. It is therefore important that applicants pay close attention to all aspects of the person specification when deciding if their skills, experience and knowledge match these requirements.

Person Specification Qualifications & Eligibility

• MB BS or equivalent medical qualification
• Fully registered with the GMC with a licence to practise at the time of appointment.
• Included on the GMC Specialist Register OR within six months.
• In good standing with GMC with respect to warning and conditions on practice
• Approved clinician status OR able to achieve within 3 months of appointment

Transport

• Holds and will use valid UK driving licence OR provides evidence of proposed alternative.

Clinical Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• Excellent knowledge in specialty
• Excellent clinical skills using bio-psycho-social perspective and wide medical knowledge
• Excellent oral and written communication skills in English
• Wide range of specialist and sub specialist experience relevant to post within NHS or comparable service

Academic Skills & Lifelong Learning

• Able to deliver undergraduate or postgraduate teaching and training
• Ability to work in and lead team
• Demonstrate commitment to shared leadership & collaborative working to deliver improvement.
• Participated in continuous professional development
• Participated in research or service evaluation.
• Able to use and appraise clinical evidence.
• Has actively participated in clinical audit and quality improvement programmes
• Ability to work in a participatory way so that shared decision making and conversations around formulation/diagnosis and ongoing care are a collaborative endeavour with the people who access our service.

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Consultant Psychiatrist & Perinatal Clinical Lead