Specialist Mental Health Therapist

Job overview

The role will involve working in the well-established and highly regarded Mindworks New Leaf Service, working with children and young people who are in care, who are adopted and/or under special guardianship and those young people who are care leavers, ensuring that an appropriate, timely and affective therapeutic service is delivered to these vulnerable groups.

Mindworks Surrey is the children and young people’s Emotional Wellbeing, Mental Health and Learning Disability Service in Surrey.

It is delivered by a group made up of NHS, national and local voluntary sector organisations all working together.

We use an approach called THRIVE, where children and young people have a central voice in decisions about their care. Children and young people have more choices about their options, and more opportunities to access a range of services.

The New Leaf Service sits within the ‘Getting More Help’ and ‘Risk Support’ parts of the THRIVE model offering specialist intensive intervention to children, young people and their families/carers. The team’s work is underpinned by developmental trauma and attachment theories, employing therapeutic approaches based upon evidence based practice and current research and is provided in collaboration with children, young people, parents/carers and the professional network.

Main duties of the job

• We are looking for an experienced and highly skilled clinician to join our well-regarded and innovative New Leaf Specialist Service, providing assessment and therapy to looked after children, care leavers, adopted children and those with Special Guardianship Order.  The candidate will need to have significant post-qualifying experience in the field of child and adolescent mental health and an ability to demonstrate experience and understanding of the issues facing children in care, young people leaving care and children who are adopted and under Special Guardianship Orders and who have experienced trauma. An ability to demonstrate robust risk assessment and management skills with this vulnerable client group are essential to the post, as well as experience of working with children and young people and their families/carers in a therapeutic context.  Further details of the main duties and knowledge and experience required are in the attached Job Description.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To provide specialist assessments and mental health interventions working in partnership at all times with children, young people and their families and carers.
• To provide consultation, training and advice to professionals and external stakeholders working with children and young people in these vulnerable groups.
• To outreach proactively to engage care leavers.
• To support the team in safe clinical interventions, providing supervision, case management oversight and expertise in risk management.
• To be able to overcome a variety of barriers to communication when working with children, young people and families/carers who may be very traumatised, anxious, vulnerable and have difficulty articulating their problems, requiring imaginative and sensitive approaches towards engagement.
• To promote early intervention and active engagement amongst the network, being an ambassador for mental well-being and providing expertise in emotional and mental health across the system in order to effect better outcomes for children and young people.
• To be responsible for managing and prioritising own workload of children and adolescents with emotional well-being issues and more complex emerging mental health issues often involving additional difficulties, such as self-harming, depression, trauma and attachment issues.
• To be responsible for recording clinical work and communicating, both orally and in writing, in a skilled and constructive manner highly complex or distressing information.
• To use age appropriate and sensitive language when sharing assessment and treatment plans with young people being mindful where the information may be unwelcome.
• To exercise autonomous professional judgement and responsibility for professional practice.
• To consider and assess all safeguarding concerns and to act on these in accordance with national and local safeguarding procedures.
• To be committed to non-discriminatory practice, recognise and respect the protected characteristics of children, young people and families/carers. To be aware and mindful of the needs of children and young people from a wide range of racial, religious, cultural, social backgrounds, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and SEND.