It has been a few years since I completed Core Role 3 on Advice and Consultation. Initially I struggled to recall some of the exact details of the work I did to demonstrate competency in this area. I then realised that the skills from this Core Role are applied daily and over time these have become par for the course, an integral part of what I do and how I.
This Core Role focuses on how you advise and guide the work of others. This is not necessarily just students or other trainees, but includes colleagues, peers and even more senior persons. Fundamentally, one of the roles of a psychologist is to provide their expert advice to others. Very specifically, as a psychologist you cannot simply offer advice in any area of psychology. Ethically, we are each bound to work only within our particular remit, so if forensics is your area, then your remit will be within areas directly related to offending behaviour, risk and rehabilitation.
Gaining expertise is part of a person's natural training journey. However in psychology there is an extra layer of depth. We may, through training and experience, come to know know a good deal about a particular type of offender. However, to simply give advice based on "top of the head" information would run the risk of offering incorrect information and, as a consequence, could lead to harm to a patient or prisoner. As we know, research and policy are changing all the time, and as a psychologist you need to be able to give the most up to date, relevant and quality information. Everything needs thought, reflection and advice based on thorough research whose application is fully justified to the case in question.
The skills that assessors are looking for in this Core Role are derived from your decisions you make on whether the requests you receive for your psychological knowledge are appropriate for you to respond to and how you make these decisions and your subsequent response. Assessors then want to see how you review all the relevant information; literature, psychological theory, policy, guidelines and so on, to provide the best possible advice. They will also want to see how you deal with requests that are not appropriate, how and why you decide what these are, and how you manage the subsequent feedback and those professional relationships that these decisions impact.
Areas which are key to this Core Role are demonstrating how you can advise on policy and how you provide psychological information in high pressure situations, such as courts or parole board hearings. With policy advice, part of this challenge will be finding the need for this in your placement. This issue can be quite challenging but your supervisor and your registrar can help with ideas on how best to do this to meet the criteria for this Core Role. With courts or parole board hearings, not everyone will have this opportunity so finding forums where you are the "expert" and will need to defend your psychological knowledge in a similar way will be vital. To do this, you will need to review the literature for skills in delivering information to the parole board and demonstrate how you have learnt these skills and applied them to your particular forum. Again, this is an area that your registrar and supervisor can help you think through.
As with all the Core Roles, showing a clear link between literature and psychological evidence and then action is important. But in this case you also need to show how evidence helps you think ethically about the advice you give, how you decide what to respond to, what information to provide within confidentiality limits, how you deliver the information and how you evaluate how the information was received and acted upon, both the good and the bad. Your skills in evaluation, decision-making and application are key.
