RBG Children Services Specialist Clinician

Job overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen in the London Borough of Greenwich. We are looking for a motivated and committed Clinician to join the enthusiastic and dynamic Integrated Clinical Team.

We welcome applicants from a range of backgrounds and support flexible and agile working arrangements.

This is an exciting role to join a clinical service within Children’s Services in Royal Borough of Greenwich (RBG). The post offers the opportunity to combine direct clinical work with children and families, training and consultation to support teams across children’s services in working with children, young people and their families, building the capability of the workforce in supporting children with complex social, emotional and mental health needs.

Psychological professions are highly valued within Oxleas, and the successful candidate can expect an inclusive and supportive context within which to develop your career and contribute to the development of our CAMHS offer.

The successful candidate will deliver high quality, evidence based, psychological service to children, young people and their families, carers and professional networks in keeping with iThrive principles.

Our service sits within culturally diverse Greenwich and offers a rich and stimulating environment from where to work. There is very good public transport link with buses and trains.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will provide mental health services to children, young people and families in the borough who are experiencing mental health, emotional, or behavioural difficulties and who are known to Children’s Services.

The post holder will contribute to the development of therapeutic provision within Children Services and offer a range of individual, parent and family, evidence-based interventions. This will include providing a service to children and young people presenting with a range of emotional, psychological and mental health difficulties who are under a Child in Need or Child Protection plan, adopted, in foster care or living in special guardianship arrangements.

The post holder will also use the elements and concepts of the Greenwich Practice Framework to achieve positive change for children, young people and their families. The Greenwich Practice Framework was developed in partnership with staff at all levels and brings together a range of complementary and evidence-led concepts drawn from Systemic and Compassionate Mind theory and practice into the domains of individual, family, contextual and wider systems using areas of Mattering, Doing, Reflection and Compassion.

The post holder will share their time between offering direct work, consultation, training and service development.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To deliver clinical input across Children’s Services by offering specialist support to children, young people and their families.
• To provide specialist psychologically-informed CAMHS assessments of clients referred to the team based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources.
• To formulate 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 employed individually and in synthesis, 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 or group.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
• To provide consultation and training to local authority colleagues and carers.
• To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all CYP of the service, across settings and agencies.
• To provide reflective consideration of different options for working with children, young people and families
• To support colleagues to think about the network around the child and what may be the most appropriate support to address their need.
• To work in close collaboration with other Children’s Services colleagues to fulfil and further develop the multi-disciplinary offer to children and families.
• To develop strong joint working relationships and practices across Children’s Services and Oxleas CAMHS, between clinical and non-clinical staff at all levels of the organization.
• 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.
• To provide highly specialist consultation, supervision advice and guidance to other professionals working with families both within the service and in partner agencies. This will include liaison and working with professional networks involved with highly complex, emotive and often conflictual issues such as those involving child protection, deliberate self harm, violence, trauma, suicide risk, criminal offending behaviour, sexualised behaviour, and mental health problems of parents.
• To work in accordance with CAMHS and team objectives by adhering to Trust and Directorate policies, including risk assessment in all work, ensuring care plans are in place, recording up to date, attending and contributing a systemic view in case discussion and team meetings.
• To contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of the team’s operational policies and services, through the development of systemic professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit including CYP-IAPT principles.
• To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi- disciplinary care.