Principal Systemic Family Therapist | Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust

This role provides senior clinical leadership in the development, delivery, and embedding of systemic family therapy across the Forensic Directorate inpatient services, spanning medium secure and low secure settings. Low secure services include non-LD adult male wards as well as Learning Disability wards.

The post holder will operate with a high level of autonomy and professional authority, translating the Trust’s approved Family Therapy business case and policy into consistent, safe, and clinically effective practice across the forensic pathway. You will contribute to governance, service development, and evaluation activity, supporting equitable access to family interventions across medium secure, low secure, and low secure rehabilitation pathways.

The role combines advanced specialist clinical practice with service-level leadership. Alongside a defined caseload of complex family work, the post holder will provide consultation, supervision, and strategic input to multidisciplinary teams, ensuring that family-inclusive practice is integrated into assessment, risk management, care planning, rehabilitation planning, and discharge processes across diverse forensic populations.

We are serious about diversity and inclusion, and are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles like this one.

Responsibilities include

Clinical Practice and Risk Interface

· Provide highly specialist systemic assessments and family therapy interventions with service users and their families across forensic inpatient services, where presentations are complex and risk, safeguarding, trauma, and relational rupture are prominent.

· Adapt systemic approaches to meet the communication, cognitive, and neurodevelopmental needs of individuals within Learning Disability services, ensuring accessible and neuroaffirming practice.

· Apply advanced systemic formulation to understand how family and relational dynamics interact with mental disorder, detention, and offending-related risk, and to support MDT decision-making.

· Contribute to psychologically informed risk formulation and management by advising MDTs on relational factors that may amplify or mitigate risk, including issues relevant to safeguarding, public protection, and victim considerations.

· Work collaboratively with Responsible Clinicians and ward teams to ensure family perspectives appropriately inform CPA processes, care planning, leave planning, and discharge pathways.

· Communicate complex and sensitive clinical information to families and networks in a manner that is clear, containing, and proportionate to risk and capacity.

We are the Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust. We care for the mental health and wellbeing of people across Kent and Medway. Our teams support adults with a wide range of mental health needs. Because we cover the whole county and both hospital and community settings, we can make care more joined up and easier to access for the 1.8 million people of Kent and Medway. Rated ‘Good’ by the CQC, we care for over 2,000 people in our hospitals and 54,000 in the community each year.

Our vision is simple

We are here to help communities not just live with mental illness, but live well. It’s why we’re passionate about working with communities to make mental health care better for everyone. And everything we do is guided by our values caring, inclusive, curious and confident.

Join us - if you share our passion for better mental health care and want to be part of a team that's doing well together.

‘The High-Cost Area (HCA) allowance, also referred to as London Weighting is a payment made to employees who work in London and the surrounding areas.

As this post is based in Dartford, Gravesham or Swanley, the successful applicant will receive an additional payment each month.

5% of basic salary, subject to a minimum payment of £1,346 per year and a maximum payment of £2,270 per year (the agreed annual amount will be divided into 12 equal amounts and paid monthly) (2026/27 figures)

Please refer to the attached job description for the full details on the responsibilities and person specification

At Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust, we are serious about diversity and inclusion, and we are working hard to build this into our DNA. We warmly welcome applications for any of our roles from people from diverse backgrounds, and we are proactively encouraging applications from under-represented communities for our more senior roles, like this one.

This advert closes on Wednesday 27 May 2026

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