Specialist Clinical or Counselling Psychologist inLondon inLondon PUBLISHED WED 8 JAN 2025

This is an exciting opportunity for a newly or recently qualified Clinical or Counselling Psychologist, who is keen to take on the challenges of working in a diverse borough with complex presentations. Candidates should have an interest in working with people with severe and enduring mental health difficulties and high comorbidity, with clients from a range of religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The post holder will be expected to work alongside other Psychologists, including a Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist who will also provide supervision.

The successful candidate will be part of a vibrant multi-disciplinary team operating out of our community office based in Isle of Dogs with an equal focus on providing input to the locality inpatient wards at Tower Hamlets Centre for Mental Health at Mile End Hospital. The post holder will work alongside the team's 8a Psychologist providing assessment and empirically informed, but necessarily flexible, therapy to service users. In collaboration with more senior staff, the successful candidate will contribute to staff training and provide psychological advice (informal, ad hoc , and formal consultation) to other staff, support family members and liaise with primary and secondary care providers and various other statutory and non-statutory agencies involved in service users' care.

We are seeking someone who values and enjoys multi-disciplinary team working, co-production, indirect psychological interventions, and who is able to work collaboratively across different agencies. We welcome innovations and a readiness to try out new ideas as part of our commitment to continuous improvement and the development of our staff.

Your service area is part of the wider psychology and psychological therapy provision in Tower Hamlets, and you would be joining a community of psychologists and psychological therapists working across Inpatient, NMHT, EI, perinatal, art therapies, personalities disorder services, homelessness, learning difficulties, older adults, PTS, psychiatric liaison, community health, and community access service. The department aims to develop and deliver our services through co-production with people with lived experience and has an excellent relationship with the Local Recovery College. We meet regularly and support professional development in a range of ways.

The post-holder will be offered a range of opportunities for accredited post-qualification therapy training. The role offers excellent opportunities for developing skills in leadership, service-development and co-production, and there are significant opportunities for career development within the trust.

About us

Key responsibilities of the role include to:

• Provide specialist psychological assessments of service users of the locality service, when care is managed under the CPA (community and in patients). This is to be based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex psychological data from a variety of quantitative and qualitative sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and assessments with service users and others involved in their care. This can include the interpretation and explanation of the results of cognitive and neuropsychological tests in the context of the service users circumstances and current difficulties and the communication of these findings to those involved in the network of care and in care planning.
• Be responsible for the formulation and implementation of a broad range of specialist psychological treatment and/or management of service users mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of those problems derived from a broad theoretical knowledge of psychology, and employing methods based upon evidence of proven efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
• Be responsible for implementing a range of specialist psychological interventions for individual service users, carers and groups, employed singly and in combination, adjusting and refining psychological formulations as practice and experience demand, and drawing upon different explanatory models to maintain a number of provisional hypotheses.
• Evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical, development and cultural processes and systems which have shaped the individual, family or group.
• Be responsible for providing and receiving highly complex, sensitive, distressing and emotional information in relation to mental and physical health issues, where there are often difficulties in terms of acceptance or understanding.
• Communicate across language and cultural barriers, including working for sustained periods of time by communicating with service users, carers or groups through professional interpreters or advocates
• Spend sustained amounts of time with individuals who may be aggressive and hostile to themselves or others, who may have poor communication and/or self-care skills and special physical and/or mental health needs.
• Be responsible for recording, monitoring and reporting on clinical work and communicating, in a skilled and sensitive manner, complex clinical information (including assessment, formulation, treatment plans and progress) to a variety of recipients (e.g. service users, carers, other professionals, formal panels, statutory and voluntary organisations) orally, in writing and electronically.
• Undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual service users as appropriate.