Senior Psychological TherapistinLondoninLondonPUBLISHED SUN 13 APR 2025

Job Overview

To work as a member of the clinical/service/team, providing a high quality, specialist applied psychology service to clients, their families or carers. To support psychological practice within the team through consultation, supervision, formulation and training.

To participate in systemic clinical governance. To offer clinical supervision to assistant, trainee and more junior psychologists and other staff. To utilise research skills for audit service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

To provide a qualified, high-quality specialist psychology service to individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams, in line with best, evidence-based practice and trust care pathways.

To be responsible for holding and managing a clinical caseload and to exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the planning and prioritising of own workload and the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients, within the bounds of the service operational policy.

Main duties of the job

• To carry out specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the service, based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex psychological data from a variety of sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with clients, family members and others involved in the client’s care, in order to reach a psychological formulation of the client’s difficulties.
• To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and 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.
  
  

Working for our organisation

By joining CNWL’s Health & Justice Directorate you will be joining a large department of psychologists and psychological therapists that provide a variety of mental health and OPD services across prisons, the youth estate, secure hospitals and the community. Our staff are dynamic and welcoming and the networking and CPD opportunities are central to our services ethos. We have active research forums and promote our services and work through academic and clinical forums. All staff receive regular supervision and are supported with career aspirations and progression.

The successful applicant may have contact with patients or service users. As an NHS Trust we strongly encourage and support vaccination as this remains the best way to protect yourself, your family, your colleagues and of course patients and service users when working on our healthcare settings.

Detailed Job Description And Main Responsibilities

• To use analytical and judgment skills and be responsible for taking clinical management decisions in complex clinical issues.
• To clinically supervise assistant psychologists, trainee psychologists and junior psychologists, psychological therapists or counsellors and other staff as appropriate.
• To professionally supervise and, when appropriate, manage, assistant psychologists and trainee psychologists.
• To provide consultation, mentorship, supervision and advice about psychological issues to other members of the team/service and other professionals working with service users, across a range of agencies/ settings as appropriate.
• To work autonomously within professional guidelines and exercise responsibility for the systematic governance of psychological practice within the service/team.
• To contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of the team’s operational policies and services, through the deployment of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit, and to advise both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing.
• To utilise research skills to undertake service evaluation, audit and research as appropriate and disseminate the results in the service and nationally.
• To propose and implement policy changes within the area served by the service.
  
  

Person specification

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE Paid/unpaid Relevant To Job

Essential criteria

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment and treatment of clients across the full range of care settings, including outpatient, community, primary care and inpatient settings
• Demonstrate specialist experience gained post qualification of working as an applied psychologist with evidence of having received a substantial amount of clinical supervision (normally in the region of approximately 50 hours)
• Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups, across the whole life course presenting problems that reflect the full range of clinical 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 representing psychology within context of multidisciplinary care.
• Experience of the application of applied psychology in different cultural contexts and experience of working within a multicultural framework.
• Experience of teaching, training and/or supervision
• Experience or demonstrable knowledge of working with the particular client group served by the team/service
• Knowledge of guidance and legislation in relation to the client group and mental health
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialist psychological therapies in specific difficult to treat groups (e.g. personality disorder, dual diagnosis, people with additional disabilities etc)
• Experience of delivering brief, primary care, CBT interventions or equivalent
• High level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies.
• Formal Training in Supervision of other psychologists.
• Evidence