Featured Job: Head of Psychological Wellbeing Service

We spoke to Lis Skeet, Services Director at Help for Heroes.

Many people will have heard of Help for Heroes, but can you explain its core mission?
We exist to give our nation's heroes one less battle to fight, to enable them to live secure and healthy lives with purpose. No matter when or where someone served, we believe anyone affected by military service deserves a fair deal.

Our service evolved out of a growing need to attend to the psychological wellbeing of our beneficiaries, as well as to support the breadth of our recovery services to be as effective as possible, including those primarily focused on physical health and wellbeing.

As more beneficiaries presented with psychological needs and difficulties, the psychological wellbeing service grew accordingly. We now have psychological wellbeing teams in four of our five UK regions.

What services does it offer?
A wide menu: individual assessment and support; psycho-educational interventions; groupwork; workshops and psychological support on identified activities and events. Our team combines Psychological Wellbeing Advisors (PWAs) and Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners (PWPs) supported by managers in each region.

PWAs are available to offer assessments for psychological support, psychological risk assessments for activities, individual support, groupwork facilitation and activity support. PWPs also offer our Hidden Wounds programme. This is a structured step two, low intensity CBT, IAPT programme developed with Exeter University.  Outcome measures are consistently positive, confirming its ongoing efficacy.

Our National Psychological Wellbeing Team offers strategic direction, clinical leadership and service development to ensure best practice and the development of evidence-based service provision. Our approach is multi-modal yet centred around the humanistic. We tailor an individual's support to their current circumstances, abilities and desire for change. We incorporate Compassion Focussed Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy and Client-Centred Humanistic theory.

Can you give an idea of the job's main responsibilities?
They are varied. Obviously, there's an overall leadership responsibility for quality standards, people management, evaluation of outcomes and continuous improvement, among other things. Risk evaluation is important. This person will also have a media role – being the subject matter spokesperson and helping develop messaging about psychological wellbeing. Policy, service development and strategy thinking are central.

We're looking for a chartered psychologist with a minimum of ten years' post qualification experience. Knowledge, understanding and experience of military related mental health issues, presentation and teaching skills and experience of media work will be important. We'd like an engaging leader with excellent interpersonal skills for whom high standards and continuous improvement is a key driver. A developer of people, with a collaborative and creative, solution-focused approach.

- Read more at Jobs in Psychology.