Job summary
- Main area
- Adult Learning Disabilities
- Grade
- Band 8a
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week
- Job ref
- 277-6825243-ALD
- Employer
- Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Queen Mary's Hospital
- Town
- Sidcup
- Salary
- £59,490 - £66,239 pa inc
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 12/01/2025 23:59
Employer heading
Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist
Band 8a
Job overview
To provide a clinical psychology service to clients of the Intensive Community Support Team providing specialist psychological assessment, intervention and treatment. Supervising qualified clinical psychologists, psychological therapists and trainee clinical psychologists, and offering advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and to other, non-professional carers. Working autonomously within professional guidelines and within the overall framework of the service’s policies and procedures. Utilising research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.
NB The post holder will work with service users in Oxleas Learning Disability Directorate, who may originate from Greenwich, Bromley or Bexley. The post holder will be based within the boroughs of Bexley, Bromley or Greenwich.Ìý
Main duties of the job
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- To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the 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 client’s care.
Ìý
- To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems and other relevant issues, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.Ìý
- To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.Ìý
- 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.
Working for our organisation
Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.
We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.
Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families.Ìý This is strengthened by our new values:
- We’re Kind
- We’re Fair
- We Listen
- We Care
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Ìý
- 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.Ìý
- 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. Ìý
- To act as care coordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans under enhanced CPA including clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved the network of care.
- 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.
Management responsibilities:Ìý
- To contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of the team’s operational policies and services, through the deployment of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit.
- To advise both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing.Ìý
- To manage the workloads of more junior clinical psychologists, psychological therapists, assistant practitioner and graduate psychologists, within the framework of the team/service’s policies and procedure
- To be involved, as appropriate, in the shortlisting and interviewing of more junior clinical psychologists, psychological therapists, assistant practitioner/graduate psychologists.
Person specification
Education/Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Doctoral level training in clinical psychology or equivalent (e.g. counselling 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.
- Completion of further post-doctoral post-qualification specialist training including training in supervision of trainee clinical psychologists.
Desirable criteria
- Pre-qualification training and qualifications in research methodology, staff training and/or other fields of applied psychology.
Experience
Essential criteria
- 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.
Desirable criteria
- Experience of teaching, training and/or supervision.
- Experience of the application of clinical psychology in different cultural contexts.
Skills/Abilities/Knowledge
Essential criteria
- Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment, intervention and management frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration.
- Well developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
- 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.
Desirable criteria
- Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat groups (e.g. personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities etc).
- High level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies.
Other Requirements
Essential criteria
- Ability to form good working relationships with others in a multidisciplinary setting.
- 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 identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance as appropriate, to support and maintain clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour.
Desirable criteria
- Experience of working within a multicultural framework.
Employer certification / accreditation badges
Applicant requirements
You must have appropriate UK professional registration.
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Application numbers
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Valentina Cassutti
- Job title
- Principal Clinical Psychologist
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Telephone number
- 07919580150
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