This is an exciting opportunity for an innovative, creative and enthusiastic Band 7 Psychologist to join the Cambridge Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Team and working into inpatient wards at Fulbourn Hospital.

You will help people to make sense of their crisis using psychological formulation and introduce short-term psychological interventions to help them to cope, supporting the wider network in making sense of and responding appropriately to their difficulties. Where appropriate you may continue to provide some input to people who are admitted to the inpatient wards, allowing you to maintain and develop your longer-term therapy skills. You will also work with inpatient colleagues to help the crisis team's work to support early discharge and provide home treatment to facilitate this.

As well as direct work, you will have the opportunity to develop skills in coaching colleagues in psychological understanding and intervention, providing supervision and facilitating reflective practice and team formulation sessions.

Your role will form part of our psychology team working across the acute pathway. This is an exciting opportunity to become part of a dedicated growing team who make a difference to patients, carers and the teams in which we are based. You will also play a key role in service development and evaluation.

The team currently comprises a Principal Clinical Psychologist, Senior Clinical Psychologist and two Assistant Psychologists.

Main duties of the job

Under the overall co-ordination of the Senior Clinical Psychologist, to provide a qualified Clinical Psychology service to patients of the Crisis and Home Treatment Team and with some input to the Mulberry wards;

Providing specialist psychological assessment, formulation and intervention;

To work with patients in crisis and their carers who at times are experiencing high levels of distress and some of whom may become challenging both verbally and physically;

Providing advice and consultation on patients' psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and to other carers;

Contributing to the training and supervision of non psychologist staff in psychological interventions; working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team's policies and procedures.

To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

The post does not have any budgetary responsibilities.

To work with patients within their own homes and other community and NHS venues. At times there will be lone working in these environments, where there is an expectation to follow the relevant safety protocols.

About us

Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust is a health & social care organisation dedicated to providing high quality care with compassion to improve the health & wellbeing of the people we care for, as well as supporting & empowering them to lead a fulfilling life.

Our clinical teams deliver many NHS services not only via inpatient and primary care setting but also with the community. These services include Children, Adult & Older Peoples mental & physical health, Forensic & Specialist mental health, Learning Disabilities, Primary Care & Liaison psychiatry, Substance misuse, Social care, Research & Development.

To achieve our goal, we look to recruit high calibre candidates that share our vision & values. As an equal opportunities employer, we encourage applications from all sectors of the community, particularly from under-represented groups including disabled people & members of our ethnic minorities & LGBTQ+ communities.

Job description Job responsibilities

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

To provide psychological assessments of patients referred to the Crisis and Home Treatment Team (CRHT) based upon complex data from a variety of sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with patients, family members and others.

To develop psychological formulations of presenting problems or situations integrating information from a range of sources And to communicate these with colleagues to inform care plans (as above).

To develop and implement plans for the psychological treatment and/or management of a patients mental health problems.

To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams.

To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options, working in a collaborative way.

To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of patients, and manage and maintain a caseload in line with service guidelines and under the overall co-ordination of the supervising Clinical Psychologist and CRHT leadership team.

To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to patients formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.

To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all patients of the service.

To provide psychological input to patients on the acute wards (Mulberry 1, 2 and 3) on a case-by-case basis in order to support the consistent provision of care through the acute pathway.

To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual patients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological understanding of risk assessment and management, in line with Trust and inter-agency policies and procedures.

To communicate, in a skilled and sensitive manner, information that may be highly contentious or distressing.

To monitor and evaluate progress during the course of care, and to provide appropriate reports on this.

To produce reports on patients, in a timely manner, that convey the key findings of psychological assessment and formulation and treatment outcome in a way that does justice to the complexity of the problems described and are understandable to the recipients of the reports, including patients and referrers.

To assist in the management of the team caseload.

Support the delivery and supervision of Brief Psychological Interventions by the team through formulation and supervision of colleagues.

Person Specification Education/Qualifications Essential

• Doctoral level training in clinical psychology, including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology, as accredited by the BPS/HCPC
• Registered as a Practitioner Psychologist with the HCPC

Experience Essential

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment, formulation and treatment of patients across the full range of care settings.
• Experience of working with people experiencing a range of mental health symptoms and their families.
• Experience of working with a wide variety of patient groups, across the whole life course presenting problems that reflect the full range of clinical severity including maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse and the threat of physical abuse
• Experience of the application of clinical psychology in different contexts.

Desirable

• Lived experience of mental health
• Experience of teaching, training and/or supervision
• Experience of working within a multicultural framework

Skills/Abilities Essential

• Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment, psychological formulation, intervention and management.
• Ability to deliver evidence based therapies, including CBT for a range of presentations
• High level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies
• Skills in individual and group work and in programme planning.
• Planning and organising skills for caseload management.
• Skills in self-management, including time management.
• Well developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information, including contentious and highly distressing information, to patients, their colleagues both within and outside the NHS
• Good understanding of other professionals' theoretical perspectives of this patient group
• Ability to identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance, including regular supervision, to support and maintain clinical practice
• Advanced keyboard skills.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, enabling formation of networks with professionals within the Trust and from other agencies to promote effective team working with patients
• Able to contain and work with high levels of distress from patients.
• Able to contain and work with organisational stress.
• Interpersonally calm and able to defuse difficult, volatile situations.
• Able to tolerate ambiguity and to take decisions in situations of incomplete information.
• Ability to exercise appropriate levels of self-care and to monitor own state
• Good organisational skills
• Motivated towards personal and professional development with a strong CPD record.

Desirable

• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised, evidence based psychological therapies in specific groups (e.g. personality disorders, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities etc.)
• Ability to deliver family interventions

Knowledge/Understanding Essential

• Knowledge of legislation in relation to the patient group and its implications for clinical and professional practice
• Skills in providing consultation to other professional and non-professional groups.
• Doctoral level knowledge of research methodology, research design and complex, multivariate data analysis as practiced within the clinical fields of psychology

Physical requirements Essential

• Ability to tolerate sitting for extended periods

Other Essential

• Ability to drive, holding a current driving licence

Any attachments will be accessible after you click to apply.

310-ASMH-3951683-D