Senior Psychologist
Metro South Mental Health And Addiction Services
The Princess Alexandra Hospital Adult Acute Psychiatric Unit is a 64 bed facility housing psychiatric patients suffering from the acute phase of a mental health condition. Patients are hospitalised if their condition is serious they present a risk to self, others, or if they will suffer from further deterioration in mental state without hospitalisation. Patients in this facility may be voluntary, involuntary, forensic, or classified. Patient stay is on average 14 days but varies from one or two days to 3 years.The Senior Psychologist takes the lead in providing assessment and brief psychotherapy interventions to these patients. Assessments include multiaxial diagnosis, personality assessment, neurocognitive assessment and risk assessment. Interventions may be structured treatment plans or brief/single session interventions. Therapy modalities used include CBT, interpersonal therapy, solution-focussed brief therapy, and motivational interviewing.The Senior Psychologist is also heavily involved within the multidisciplinary team, for example by providing advice to treating psychiatrists and case managers regarding appropriate community follow up.Finally, the Senior Psychologist takes a lead role in training and supervising provisionally registered psychologists.In 2010-11 I acted as Team Leader (Allied Health) for 1 year. In this role I provided leadership to a multidisciplinary team of Allied Health Clinicians. Major achievements whilst in this role included provision of sporting equipment, bbqs, boardgames, etc for use in recreation programs, building new relationships with service providers and introducing new activities onto the ward such as Zumba and Delta Therapy Dogs, and finalisation of longstanding recruitment issues.