Community Clinical Psychologist

Job overview

The post holder will be part of the ongoing pilot project, commissioned until 2027 working within a multi-disciplinary team to support young people 16-25 affected by serious youth violence and homelessness. This role is part of the North Central London Vanguard commissioned by NHS England to develop a new model of care. The team is made up of Clinical Psychologists, Specialist Caseworkers and Therapeutic Practitioners. The team deliver accessible evidence-based and holistic mental health interventions in environments where young people feel in control and safe, including a community youth homelessness charity hub where this role is based. The post holder will hold a central role in providing assessments and adapted evidence based psychological interventions within one of our partnership community-based settings, the New Horizons Youth Centre hub. The role involves developing the psychology drop-in clinic project within the service, which is currently running to support the NHYC Youth Offending Pathways Team (NHYC YOP). This will require working closely with the NHYC YOP and NCL Vanguard teams, and multi-agency professionals to improve emotional and holistic well-being outcomes for young people affected by homelessness and serious youth violence.

Main duties of the job

This role focuses on supporting young people who find it hard to trust services, offering holistic practical and emotional intervention and engaging with the NHYC team and wider network to improve their wellbeing and increase access to housing options.  The role will also include offering advice, consultation, training, supervision and team reflective spaces to staff within NHYC YOP team and wider youth hub, as well as organisations external to the service. The post holder will contribute to providing clinical leadership across the NCL Vanguard Service, working closely with all team members in ensuring the delivery of highly innovative and adaptive evidence-based care. Alongside individual clinical work, the service works across multiple levels, seeking to shift how the wider system perceives and works with young people, hoping to address inequalities to create sustainable change. Embracing new ways of working will be key, as the model constantly evolves to respond to the needs and aspirations of young people it serves. As this is a pilot project, a core aspect of the role will be utilising research skills for data collection, audit, policy, service development and evaluation and wider research in order to evaluate the service and provide evidence for further service development and broader systemic change.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To offer specialist, highly flexible and innovative assessments for young people and occasionally their families who are affected by homelessness and community violence. This may include risk assessment, and subsequent risk management, with the provision of specialist advice for other professionals.
• To formulate and support in the development of housing recommendations and support plans which are trauma informed and are tailored around each young person’s mental health and care needs.
• To formulate and implement highly specialised and innovative plans for the psychological treatment and/or management of a young person’s mental health needs where appropriate.
• To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals and groups and to evaluate and make decisions about the intervention options available. This will involve interpretation and integration of complex psychological data and competing or contradictory theories/hypotheses from professionals from other agencies.
• To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and intervention approaches for young people in relation to their housing needs and to monitor progress.
• To act as a lead professional, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans. This will involve offering staff from other agencies guidance on mental health and trauma informed care

This is not an exhaustive list, please see the attached Job Description and Person Specification for more information on the role requirements and duties.