Clinical Psychologist

Job overview

We would like to recruit an enthusiastic, creative, values led Band 7 Clinical Psychologist to work alongside the Diabetes MDT at Addenbrookes Hospital. The role is a part of the wider Paediatric Psychological Medicine Team commissioned by and based at Addenbrookes. we work to integrate Physical and Mental health and to treat the whole child, a central aspect of the future Cambridge Children's Hospital.

The psychologist will provide specialist psychological assessment and therapy to patients and their families, at the same time as offering advice and consultation on patients’ psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and to other, non professional carers, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures.  The psychologist will utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

Main duties of the job

The job involves working with children, adolescents and young adults with complex medical needs, in a hospital based settings, at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

The job involves assessment and delivery of care involving both the patient and parents and family systems where there are complex social needs.

The intervention level ranges from the specialist tertiary multidisciplinary team level and associated paediatric ward nursing teams to community paediatric teams, social care, education and primary health care. Interventions routinely cross professional and Acute Health Trust and Community Mental Health Trust boundaries and sometimes involve Child Protection work.

The job involves physical effort of the nature of sitting in a constrained position for extended patient / client therapy sessions, frequent intense concentration on assessment and formulation, it is sometimes highly distressing, dealing with such issues as chronic illness and family breakdown, and may deal with issues such as acute physical distress or illness, death, serious mental illness and child abuse.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the Paediatric psychology service, 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.
• To develop psychological formulations of presenting problems or situations that integrate information from assessments within a coherent framework that draws upon psychological theory and evidence and which incorporates interpersonal, societal, cultural and biological factors
• To develop and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems, 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.
• To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
• 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, carers or group.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients, and manage and maintain a caseload in line with service guidelines.
• To provide specialist psychological advice guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
• 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.
• 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 in line with Trust and inter-agency policies and procedures.
• To act as care coordinator, ensuring the provision of a care package appropriate for the client’s needs, coordinating the work of others involved with care, tasking responsibility for arranging reviews as required, and communicating effectively with the client, his/her family and all others involved in the network of care, and to monitor progress during the course of multi-disciplinary interventions.
• To communicate, in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, to clients, family carers and others as appropriate, information that may be contentious or highly distressing concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care
• To monitor and evaluate progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care, and to provide appropriate reports on this.
• To produce reports on clients, 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, but that are understandable to the recipients of the reports, including clients and referrers.
• To assist in the management of the team caseload.

To work in partnership with other disciplines and to maintain links with statutory and non-statutory and primary care agencies as appropriate.