Featured job - Serco Psychological Services

What kind of person do you need to be to thrive in a prison role?

To thrive in a prison environment, resilience is essential. The work is challenging and being in a prison environment only adds to that. The work, however, is extremely rewarding and when you can learn from your challenges and successes and apply them to your practice, you begin to flourish and provide exceptional services to the people in our care.

Being open-minded is fundamental to navigating the complexity of our work, but it also allows for creativity within our practice; offering innovation to the people in our care and our staff who work with them. In addition, having the ability to build strong working relationships around the prison environment and with partner agencies also ensures that we are providing a holistic approach; but also allows us to challenge ourselves and continue our own professional development.

What's changing with Serco in the next year or two?

Innovation is at the heart of what we do here. We are constantly striving to be better and as such, there is always something new in development; something exciting to get involved with. One of our most significant developments over the next year or two is a new Therapeutic Community at HMP Ashfield; offering significant expansion to our psychological provision. Having a growing psychological provision also offers exciting opportunities for cross-site working; gaining experience with different populations and different models of working.

What might be a typical challenge faced by someone in one of these roles?

Adjusting to a prison environment may be challenging for someone who has never worked within one. There may also be some personal challenges through working with individuals who have committed serious crimes. Some of the individuals we work have significant traumas and other complexities and can often display challenging, violent, and/ or self-injurious behaviours; something that most people will not see in their day-to-day roles. 

The support offered around Serco is however, fantastic. Staff wellbeing is so important to Serco and the management within the establishments promote this within the way that they work with their staff which helps mitigate whatever challenges someone may be facing. We have services such as on-site counselling, wellbeing hubs, wellbeing days and managers operate an open-door policy to provide the best support to staff.

• Find more on the Jobs in Psychology website.