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Job overview
Lead the Change: Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist – Trailblazer Programme (Band 8a)
Are you a visionary Psychologist ready to redefine the intersection of Mental Health and Economic Wellbeing?
We are seeking a Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist to provide expert leadership for our ground-breaking Trailblazer 'Life Re-worked' Programme. This is a brand-new, high-profile role designed to support economically inactive adults with mental health issues, helping them navigate the journey back to sustainable employment and health.
As a senior lead in this innovative service, you will move beyond standard clinical delivery into a space of strategic influence, consultation, and complex service architecture.
Main duties of the job
Why this leadership role is a career-defining opportunity:
- Clinical Autonomy & Expertise: You'll provide specialist psychological assessments & therapies for clients with highly complex needs.
- Consultant Resource: You will act as a specialist "go-to" for non-psychologist colleagues, offering expert advice & consultation to Primary Care & Employment teams.
- Shape the Service: This is a Trailblazer initiative, meaning you will utilise your research skills for audits, policy development & service-wide projects. You will have a direct hand in the policy changes that support our economically inactive population.
- Supervisory Leadership: You will play a vital role in establishing the service & providing mentorship to junior staff (including our Trailblazer Assistant Psychologists) & overseeing doctoral-level research.
We are looking for a Psychologist who is:
- A Specialist Practitioner: You hold a Doctoral level qualification in Clinical Psychology and have significant experience managing complex multi-pathologies and "difficult to treat" groups.
- A Strategic Thinker: You are comfortable using complex multivariate data analysis and research to drive service delivery and demonstrate impact.
- A Collaborative Leader: You thrive in a multicultural framework and can build effective relationships across the NHS, DWP, and local community stakeholders.
Join a service where your clinical judgment doesn't just treat patients, it builds the future of community health.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
** Successful applicants will be required to demonstrate alignment with the Trust’s values & the behaviours aligned to those values - Accountability, Inclusion, Compassion, and Empowerment, alongside fulfilling the duties detailed in the attached Job Description and Person Specification.
Person specification
Other
Essential
- Ability to identify, provide and promote appropriate means of support to carers and staff exposed to highly distressing situations and severely challenging behaviours.
- Ability to identify, and employ, as appropriate, clinical governance mechanisms for the support and maintenance of clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour. • Ability to develop and use complex multi-media materials for presentations in public, professional and academic settings.
Desirable
- Experience of working within a multicultural framework.
Skills
Essential
- 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, highly technical, and 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 design and methodology, including complex multivariate data analysis as practiced within the field of clinical psychology.
- Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and mental health
Desirable
- Well-developed 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).
- Knowledge of the theory and practice of highly specialised psychological therapies and assessment methodologies.
Experience
Essential
- Assessed experience of working as a qualified clinical psychologist for a minimum of two years.
- Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups, across the whole life course and presenting with the full range of clinical severity across the full range of care settings including outpatient, community, primary care, in-patient and residential care settings 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.
- Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for clients’ psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care coordinator and also within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
- Experience of teaching and training.
Desirable
- Experience of representing psychology within the context of multi-disciplinary care.
- Experience of assessing and treating clients across the full range of care settings.
- Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.
Qualifications
Essential
- Post-graduate doctoral level training in clinical psychology (or its equivalent for those trained prior to 1996) as accredited/recognised by the BPS, including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics, and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology.
Desirable
- Post-doctoral training in one or more additional specialised areas of psychological practice.
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Applying for this NHS job
This advert is for Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist with Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust in London, London, England. It is listed as a Band 8 Psychologist role. The advertised salary is £63,665 - £70,887 per annum, inclusive of HCAS. The contract type is Fixed term: 11 months (Contract end date - 31st March 2027). The application deadline is 21 Jun 2026.
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