Psychology and Psychotherapies

As set out in our Trust Strategy, we are committed to achieving a Psychology and Psychotherapies workforce that is representative, sustainable and feels supported in Making Life Better Together. This includes developing pathways to help people pursue these careers and, especially, addressing the difficulty of getting relevant experience to do this.

With this in mind, we offer specific roles and placements that can provide pre-qualification experience across our services and have outlined these below with some details about how to enquire or apply.

Roles at SWLStG (via SWLStG Vacancies Website)

·       Assistant Psychologists – This is amongst the most common and competitive routes to a career in P&P. Assistant Psychologists are employed across our Trust and you can find out more about this role on the NHS Health Careers website: Assistant psychologist | Health Careers. These roles can be especially difficult to get for those who face additional barriers. As a Trust, we have agreed to explicitly support access to our profession for those from financially-disadvantaged backgrounds and we therefore do not offer unpaid Honorary Assistant Psychologist roles.

·       ASPIRE Assistant Psychologists - As part of our commitment to Anti-Racism and in line with our values and behaviours framework, we aim to address barriers and improve the diversity of our workforce through the ASPIRE programme. This offers paid work experience as an Assistant Psychologist for people from under-represented backgrounds in our profession, including those from the Global Majority and those who are financially-disadvantaged. You can find out more about the ASPIRE programme, including details of how to apply and sign-up to a mailing list here: Aspiring Clinical Psychologists - Website.

·       Wellbeing Practitioners (including Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners and Mental Health and Wellbeing Practitioners) – These are roles which are applied for through NHS Trusts, but which include simultaneous training from a separate education provider. You can find more information about this role here: Psychological wellbeing practitioner | Health Careers

·       Other Roles - This is not an exhaustive list and there may be other posts which offer relevant experience outside of these roles, such as Research Assistants, Recovery Support Workers and Peer Support Workers. It can be helpful to include these when searching for vacancies.

Placements at SWLStG (via Education Providers)

·       Undergraduate Placements - We work with some universities to offer placements to undergraduate psychology students as part of their course curriculums. Please enquire directly with your university to see if SWLStG has this arrangement in place with them. Unfortunately, we do not currently offer any placements outside of this framework and we regret that we do not have the capacity to accommodate individual requests for placements.

·       Prudence Skynner Family and Couple Therapy Clinic - Clinical Placements are sometimes available at the Prudence Skynner Family and Couple Therapy Clinic and information and contact details for this can be found here: Family and couple therapy - Website

We acknowledge that this page mainly focusses on Psychology as the most common discipline for P&P roles in NHS services. We also recognise that this makes getting pre-qualification experience particularly challenging for those who would like to a pursue careers in other disciplines, such as Psychotherapy. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy has some helpful information about finding placements to support this here: Training to become a therapist.