Chief Nursing Officer

Permanent Position

SUMMARY

The Austen Riggs Center (Riggs) is seeking a Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) to direct a complex and psychodynamic, relationship-based, nursing service. The CNO will work collaboratively with specially trained clinicians to provide the highest quality care for patients in a fully open and voluntary therapeutic milieu. Supervising a nursing staff of about twenty, the CNO is a pivotal role promoting the Riggs core values of supporting patient authority, fostering relationships, and understanding oneself and others.   This is an opportunity to lead a staff in the frontier of a world renowned therapeutic community and psychiatric hospital.

THE POSITION

The Austen Riggs Center is a therapeutic community, open psychiatric hospital, and center for education and research, promoting resilience and self-direction in adults (18 plus) with complex psychiatric problems.  Riggs specializes in the long-term residential treatment of psychiatric disorders with intensive psychodynamic psychotherapy and a full range of psychiatric services, offered in a completely voluntary continuum of care that includes inpatient, residential, and day-treatment services.   Founded in 1919, Austen Riggs is located in the bucolic Berkshires, on Norman Rockwell’s Main Street in the small town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Internationally known for our respectful work with emotionally troubled individuals, Riggs is consistently ranked a U.S. News & World Report “Best Hospital” in psychiatry.   Riggs treatment focuses on

• the centrality of human relationships;
• the meaning embedded in symptomatic actions; and
• the importance of respecting the authority of individuals to direct their own lives.

Recognizing that individual troubles exist in a social context, Riggs offers extensive support for family members. Patients have opportunities to participate in a robust therapeutic community and to study in their unique activities program. Each person designs his or her own treatment in collaboration with a professional interdisciplinary team, and no two treatments are identical.   Riggs has a highly esteemed postdoctoral Fellowship for psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in advanced psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalytic studies. The Erikson Institute for Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center studies individuals in their social contexts through research, training, education, and outreach programs in the local community and beyond.   For more information about the Austen Riggs Center, visit http://austenriggs.org/