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Specialist Clinical Psychologist

Employer
West London NHS Trust
Location
London
Salary
£41,659 to £47,672 a year plus HCAS
Closing date
3 Oct 2022

View more

Grade
Band 7
Contract Type
Permanent
Hours
Full Time
This is an exciting opportunity to join an innovative social care initiative within Ealing Council who are commissioning this service in partnership with West London NHS Trust. We are recruiting for one clinical psychologist for our children in care team known as Connect.

Clinical Psychologists are part of Ealing's multi-professional social care teams that work intensively with children and young people in the care of the local authority in both foster homes and residential placements and require ongoing intensive support.The Connect Service has a strong focus on innovative practice. The service developed from a pilot under the 'Brighter Futures' transformation of Ealing's children services and continues to develop and innovate in its practice; the Connect Service were the first local authority children in care (Cic) team to achieve partner organisation status with DDP (Dyadic Developmental Practice) Connects UK.

Applicants must be keen to facilitate and support service transformation and be open to supporting and encouraging new ways of working, demonstrate flexibility and adaptability in their approach to their work and team life and be willing to practice in a collaborative way with social work colleagues. A key aspect of this work is a committed, empathic and trauma-informed and responsive approach to the work with young people, carers and the professional network around them.

Main duties of the job

The clinical psychologist will be expected to offer consultation to multiagency team members in the Connect Service and develop links with the wider children's service teams. The post holder will support the Connect Service and wider children's services to embed and sustain skills in key models/ theories underpinning Brighter Futures (e.g. attachment and trauma-responsive approaches, mentalisation-based approaches) and support key team structures/ processes including group supervision. Alongside consultation, training and parenting group work the clinical psychologist will be expected to provide a specialist and intensive assessment, support and intervention service to support positive change for the children, young people and the carers.

There is training offer in place to support team and skills development that the post holder will be expected to attend e.g. Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP). The post holder will be supported by the Principal Clinical Psychologist for the Brighter Futures and supervised by a Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist in the team. There is also a large and supportive Child Clinical Psychology Group in Ealing working in a range of Tier 2 and Tier 3 CAMH Services.

We are able to provide varied opportunities for professional development and training, and have close links with UEL, UCL and Royal Holloway training courses, with trainees regularly undertaking placements within our service.

About us

West London NHS Trust is one of the most diverse providers of mental health, community and social care in the UK.

Our 3,982 staff care for people in hospital and in the community, helping them to recover and go on to lead full and productive lives. We aim to be the best organisation of our kind in the country.

We provide care and treatment for more than 800,000 people living in the London boroughs of Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow, delivering services in the community (at home, in GP surgeries and care homes), hospital, specialist clinics and forensic (secure) units.

We'rerated good overall by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Together, we're committed to promoting hope and wellbeing, working with patients, service users, carers, families and partners across the communities we serve.

We are keen to ensure that our workforce reflects the community it serves, particularly in terms of ethnicity, gender, disability, LGBTQ+ and experience of mental illness.

Job description Job responsibilities

Clinical: 1. To provide specialist psychological assessments of children and their carers referred to the team based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of 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 clients, family members and others involved in the clients care, including foster carers, school staff, other staff of the Education Authority and other workers in health, social services and the voluntary sector.

2. To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of children who have emotional or behavioural difficulties or a mental health disorder, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the clients problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.

3. To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across services employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.

4. To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family or group.

5. To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.

6. To collaborate with other members of the multi-disciplinary team in identifying mental health needs of young people, and devising psychotherapeutic treatments for children and their carers and groups where appropriate.

7. To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan, and more generally to team members, social workers and teachers and other staff working in schools, as well as to workers in other agencies.

8. To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.

9. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.

10. To take responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans including clients, their foster carers, parents, referring agents and others involved the network of care.

11. To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.

12. To develop collaborative and effective working links with social care colleagues and other agencies.

13. To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues.

Teaching, training, and supervision:1. To gain additional specialist experience and skills relevant to clinical psychology and/or the service.

2. To maintain up to date knowledge and skills in the field of child and adolescent mental health by relevant study and attendance at training events, courses and conferences.

3. To develop skills in the area of professional post-graduate teaching, training and supervision and to provide supervision to other MDT staffs psychological work, as appropriate.

4. To provide professional and clinical supervision to assistant psychologists as appropriate.

5. To supervise trainee clinical psychologists, as appropriate.

6. To provide advice, consultation and training to social care staff in connection with ongoing casework and referrals received and from initiatives aimed at boosting the capacity of social care colleagues and foster carers to manage mental health issues constructively. Training will also be provided to further frontline workers in education, health and social care settings as regards the mental health needs of the client group as appropriate.

Management, recruitment, policy and service development:1. To contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of the teams operational policies and services, through the deployment of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit.

2. To advise both service and professional managers on service development and policy in relation to the mental health needs of children, families and carers using the service.

3. To support and manage the workloads of assistant psychologists as may be appointed in Ealing Childrens services, within the framework of the teams policies and procedures.

4. To be involved, as appropriate, in the short-listing and interviewing of assistant psychologists.

Research and service evaluation:1. To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence based practice in individual work and work with other team members.

2. To undertake appropriate research and provide research advice to other staff undertaking research.

3. To undertake project management, including complex audit and service evaluation, with colleagues within the service to help develop service provision. General:1. To contribute to the development and maintenance of the highest professional standards of practice, through active participation in internal and external CPD training and development programmes, in consultation with the post holders professional and service manager(s).

2. To contribute to the development and articulation of best practice in psychology and child and adolescent mental health across the service, by continuing to develop the skills of a reflexive and reflective scientist practitioner, taking part in regular professional supervision and appraisal and maintaining an active engagement with current developments in the field of child and adolescent mental health, clinical psychology and related disciplines.

3. To maintain the highest standards of clinical record keeping including electronic data entry and recording, report writing and the responsible exercise of professional self-governance in accordance with professional codes of practice of the Health Care Professions Council (HCPC), British Psychological Society and Trust policies and procedures.

4. To maintain up to date knowledge of legislation, national and local policies and issues in relation to both the specific client group and mental health.

To be noted: This is not an exhaustive list of duties and responsibilities, and the post holder may be required to undertake other duties which fall within the grade of the job, in discussion with the manager.

This job description will be reviewed regularly in the light of changing service requirements and any such changes will be discussed with the post holder.

The post holder is expected to comply with all relevant Trust policies, procedures and guidelines, including those relating to Equal Opportunities, Health and Safety and Confidentiality of Information

Person Specification TRAINING & 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 HPC.
Desirable
  • Pre-qualification training and qualifications in research methodology, staff training and/or other fields of applied psychology.
EXPERIENCE Essential
  • Experience of specialist psychological assessment and treatment of clients across the full range of care settings, including outpatient, community, primary care and in patient settings.
  • Experience of working with a wide variety of client 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 working with children and adolescents and their carer networks.
Desirable
  • Experience of teaching, training and/or supervision
  • Experience of working with other agencies.
  • Experience of the application of clinical psychology in different cultural contexts.
  • Experience of working with children and families under Social Services, including looked after Children and Children under Child in Need/Child Protection Plans who may also have mental health needs.
KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS Essential
  • Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment intervention and management frequen

    Any attachments will be accessible after you click to apply.

    222-LS-CAMHS-278-A

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