Job summary

As a Highly Specialised Practitioner Psychologist, the post holder will be responsible for the provision of high level psychological assessment and treatment of children and young people attending the Evelina specialist Long Covid Service. The post holderwill also take an active leadership role within the service, coordinating the non-medical pathway for these patients along with the oversight for data collection and evaluation within the service.

Main duties of the job

The ideal candidate will be skilled in the psychological understanding and management of physical symptoms and their relationship to overall psychosocial functioning, have a strong interest and some experience in service development and be able to provide clinical leadership across an MDT. A high level of independence and autonomy is required.

About us

Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust comprises five of the UK's best known hospitals - Guy's, St Thomas', Evelina London Children's Hospital, Royal Brompton and Harefield - as well as community services in Lambeth and Southwark, all with a long history of high quality care, clinical excellence, research and innovation.

We are among the UK's busiest, most successful foundation trusts. We provide specialist care for patients including heart and lung, cancer and renal services as well as a full range of local hospital and community services for people in Lambeth and Southwark.

We have a long tradition of clinical and scientific achievement and - as part of King's Health Partners - we are one of England's eight academic health sciences centres, bringing together world-class clinical services, teaching and research. We have one of the National Institute for Health Research's biomedical research centres, established with King's College London in 2007, as well as dedicated clinical research facilities.

Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals joined Guy's and St Thomas' in February 2021 and is the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK and among the largest in Europe. Weprovide treatment for people with heart and lung disease, including rare and complex conditions, offering some of the most sophisticated treatment that is available anywhere in the world.

Job description

Job responsibilities

Please see the JD and person specification for full details

The Evelina London is piloting a programme of Multidisciplinary assessment and brief intervention for children and young people who have had a current diagnosis of Long Covid.

The post holder will be responsible for developing and ensuring the systematic provision of a high quality and specialist psychology service to the Post-Covid clinics and to be responsible for proposing service developments in this area. In conjunction with the psychology consultant leads and multi-disciplinary clinic team, to ensure the systematic provision of a high quality specialist clinical health psychology outpatient assessment and brief intervention service to those paediatric patients in greatest need of psychological support with a post-covid presentation.

The post holder will be responsible for clinical and service leadership for the AHP/Psychology part of the MDT assessment and treatment programme. This will include, designing and operating effective triage systems, ensuring the smooth running of assessment clinics, coordinating the clinical assessment and prioritisation of patients for intervention, overseeing the management of outcome data, providing data and reports on request to senior management, supporting the service manager in the operational running over the service.

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

• Doctoral level qualification in clinical psychology (or it's equivalent for those who trained before 1996) as accredited by BPS, including specific models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuro- psychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and life span developmental psychology
• Eligibility for Chartered status with the BPS and membership of the Division of Health/Clinical/Educational Psychology.
• Registration with Health and Care Professions Council as a practitioner psychologist.

Desirable

• Post-doctoral training in one or more specialised areas of psychological practice (neuropsychology or CBT)

Experience

Essential

• At least 4 years post qualification experience of highly specialist psychological assessment and treatment in the area of chronic and acute physical health problems and disability.
• Experience in the psychological management of physical problems in children and young people including highly specialist experience and knowledge of using cognitive behaviour and systemic techniques for assessment, formulation and treatment of children and young people with complex health problems.
• Experience of providing both group based and individual interventions
• Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for clients' psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care co-ordinator and also within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
• Experience of consultation to and supervision of other staff.
• Experience of working with, and addressing issues of diversity.
• Experience of developing and carrying out complex audit, research and service evaluation projects.

Desirable

• Clinical experience in the management pain and fatigue in children and young people.

Skills & Knowledge

Essential

• Highly specialist knowledge relevant to working with children and young people with a medical condition, generalizable to PIMS-TS and Long Covid and related issues.
• Advanced level knowledge of at least two models of psychological therapy relevant to children and young people with medical conditions and knowledge of the theoretical and evidence base for them (one of these should be cognitive behaviour therapy).
• Ability and skills to supervise and line manage junior clinical psychologists and clinical psychology trainees having completed the relevant training.
• Highly developed verbal and written communication skills including the ability to communicate complex, highly technical and clinically sensitive information in a form that can be understood by young people, families, and a wide range of lay and professional persons within and outside the NHS.
• Ability to teach and train others, using a variety of complex multi-media materials suitable for presentations within public, professional and academic settings.
• Ability to work effectively within a multidisciplinary team, hold leadership roles and contribute to effective team functioning.
• Ability to identify, provide and promote appropriate means of support to carers and staff exposed to highly distressing situations and severely challenging behaviour.

Any attachments will be accessible after you click to apply.

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