Practitioner Psychologist, Psychotherapist & Psychological Therapist

Job overview

The START Team have provided specialist mental health services to homeless people across South London for over 30 years. The successful post holder will join a new small specialist team, providing trauma-informed care to homeless people presenting with substance misuse and mental health difficulties in Croydon. This sub-team will have close links to the core START Team.

The role is to provide a specialist psychology service to adult rough sleepers in the borough of Croydon, who have difficulties with their mental health and alcohol/substance use (i.e. supporting the ‘dual diagnosis’ rough sleeping population).

This is part of an exciting Public Health England led project, targeting the local authorities with the highest numbers of people sleeping rough, who have been moved into emergency accommodation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project is planned for four years and will provide specialist support for individuals to access and engage with drug and alcohol treatment and move towards longer-term accommodation.

Main duties of the job

The role will involve the provision of direct psychological interventions to homeless people, including specialist assessment, treatment, planning, implementation and monitoring of outcomes. These will be delivered through street outreach (including to local homeless day services) and in-reach to emergency accommodation (including hotels, hostels and temporary supported accommodation).  Direct clinical work will be undertaken with patients presenting with a range of difficulties. The successful candidate will be proficient in evidence based interventions for people presenting with psychosis and other mental health difficulties.

The role will also involve providing indirect interventions, using a trauma-informed model, including clinical consultation, supervision, and training to colleagues and staff from partnership organisations (mainly from addiction and homelessness services).

To contribute to contract reports, service evaluation, audit and research, to support future service commissioning and the development of new models of best practice.

This post is a 12 month fixed-term post. It is a part-time post, 30 hours per week.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To ensure the systematic provision of a psychological therapy service  for the START (Homeless Outreach Team) and personally provide specialist clinical input.
• To contribute to enabling other staff, service users and carers from diverse backgrounds to flourish by working to create a psychologically safe environment.
• To provide clinical supervision and consultation as appropriate, functioning as a specialist for the START (Homeless Outreach) Team.
• To promote service evaluation, audit, research and policy development.
• To work as an autonomous professional within registration body guidelines and codes of conduct, and guided by principles and policies or procedures of the service, taking responsibility for interpreting policies within defined parameters.
• To agree outcomes/results with clinical/professional lead and to decide how they are best achieved.
• To support staff support initiatives within their area, working with senior colleagues and, Corporate Psychology and Psychotherapy, where appropriate, to support colleagues and ensure staff in SLaM have access to evidence based support. To participate, as a recipient, in staff support work when appropriate.