Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist

Job overview

To provide a qualified specialist child and adolescent psychotherapy service to children and young people with mental health problems across all sectors of care as part of a multi-disciplinary CAMHS team. Providing specialist psychotherapeutic assessment and therapy to service users and their families/carers and advice and consultation on their care to non-psychotherapist colleagues and the professional network involved in their support. The post holder will work autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the service’s policies and procedures. They will utilise research skills for audit to support policy and service development; and undertake research within the area served by the service and of relevance to young people their families and carers.

The post holder will provide generic CAMHS assessment and intervention as well as providing specialist psychotherapeutic interventions and contributing to specialist support plans for the care of children and young people who are looked after. They will contribute to highly specialist assessments of children with complex mental health presentations.

Main duties of the job

• Evaluate and make decisions about treatment options considering both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family or group
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of children and young people whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
• Contribute directly and indirectly to a framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all children and young people of the service, across all settings and agencies serving children and young people with learning disabilities and mental health problems/challenging behaviour
• To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual children and young people.
• Act as care coordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of CAMHS care plans including children and young people, their carers, referring agents and others involved in the network of care.
• Communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of children and young people under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni and multi-disciplinary care.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Provide specialist psychotherapeutic assessments of children and young people referred to the team based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources
• Formulate and implement plans for the formal treatment and/or management of the child/young person’s problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings
• Be responsible for implementing a range of psychotherapeutic interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams employed individually and in synthesis, grounded in the principles and techniques of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. These will include long and short-term interventions as appropriate to need
• Evaluate and make decisions about treatment options considering both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family or group