Clinical/Counselling Psychologist - Preceptorship Opportunity

Job overview

WE WOULD WELCOME APPLICATIONS FROM CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGISTS  WHO ARE IN THEIR FINAL YEAR OF DOCTORAL TRAINING.

We have an exciting opportunity for either a newly qualified band 7 clinical psychologist looking for a post with potential career progression or for an established band 8a clinical psychologist to join our team of psychologists within the Cambridge adult locality team.

We are located in the vibrant University City of Cambridge. The locality service provides high quality care to people aged 17 and above, who are experiencing the symptoms of moderate to severe mental health difficulties.

The service operates friendly and well established multi-disciplinary teams with a wide range of professionals contributing to the excellent care of the people that we support. Recovery principles are embedded in the work of the locality teams and we aim to support people to reach their potential by facilitating hope, empowering autonomy and developing meaning and purpose in life.

Please note for this role you will need the ability to travel independently and in a timely manner across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to meet strict time deadlines.

Main duties of the job

The post-holder will be responsible for implementing psychological assessment, providing therapeutic interventions to people in the community and supporting the wider team to develop psychological understandings of people’s difficulties through consultation, supervision and training.

The post-holder will be required to work collaboratively with colleagues, liaising with external care providers and statutory agencies to support people and their families on their journey to wellbeing.

Supporting and developing psychologists within the team is of upmost importance to us. We encourage our psychologists to develop their skills and knowledge with CPD opportunities (including EMDR, CBTp and family work for psychosis). We believe that research is central to the development and maintenance of effective teams and interventions. Our psychologists have close links with the Doctoral Clinical Psychology course at the University of East Anglia and they routinely place their trainees within our service.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

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

• To provide specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the locality 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, ratingscales, 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 use psychological formulations 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, and to use these plans to inform and lead the work of non-psychology members of the team.
• 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.
• This includes responsibility for the delivery of psychologicalinterventions by all team members.
• 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 and under the overall co-ordination of the Lead Psychologists.
• 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 communicate, in a 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