Senior Clinical/Counselling Psychologist MMHS

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Thank you for your interest in the North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT). This is an exciting time to join us and be part of our journey to improve mental health care across North London and deliver excellent services to our local people. We will achieve this through the North London Way, as we:

• Collaborate at every level by living our values to create the right conditions for us all to work together.
• Develop our new Trust culture, to help make our new Trust a great place to work and to receive great care.
• Empower our teams to lead the planned improvements in our services, by skilling them and giving them the tools to make the changes.
• Focus on delivering excellence at every level to improve our performance and ensure consistently high-quality care across all our services.
• Ensure that research, quality improvement, and technology lead the way and are embedded in our services.
• Take a trauma informed approach to everything we do

We proactively welcome diversity in our workforce and pride ourselves on being an inclusive employer. We aim to recruit from our local communities and provide opportunities to all including apprenticeships, veterans, care leavers and more.

The North London Way to deliver: Better Mental Health, Better Lives, Better Communities.

Our trust website is: https://www.northlondonmentalhealth.nhs.uk/

Job overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a dynamic, skilled Band 8a Clinical or Counselling Psychologist to work in our Maternal Mental Health Service, Maple.

The Maple Service is for women whose trauma symptoms have a moderate to severe impact on their mental health. This may be due to a traumatic birth experience, pregnancy loss, neonatal death or the loss of a baby as a result of social care procedures due to safeguarding concerns. The trauma may also exist prior to conception, e.g. when tokophobia prevents a woman from achieving a wanted pregnancy.

Staff normally run clinics at team bases, maternity sites as well as conducting home visits. Some clinical work is additionally carried out via video call. Therefore, the successful post-holder must be willing to travel and work flexibly.

Specialist supervision will be provided for the successful applicant by the band 8b Lead Psychologist in the Team. There is a large psychology team working across the whole service who meet regularly, provide peer support, and develop/review the psychological service.

The post holder will actively contribute to the planning, development and evaluation of the maternal mental health service using advanced clinical leadership skills and knowledge to provide training and consultancy in clinical psychology within the specialty area of perinatal mental health. The post holder will be responsible for assessing and treating service users. They are expected to hold a highly complex caseload.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will jointly oversee the Clinical Psychology caseload of the West sub-team with another 8a already in post.

They will ensure the formulation of profession specific highly specialist care and treatment plans which provide specialist interventions / care to service users with complex mental health conditions. The post holders will be responsible for supporting and supervising band 7 Psychologists and/or trainees, ensuring that the Clinical Psychology team understands and operates to the requirements of the service line operational policy and service line strategy and that safe, evidence based, NICE concordant, effective, culturally competent care is delivered in a timely manner to service users.

Working for our organisation

North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) is committed to improving mental health care across North London to deliver excellent services to our local people.

Our Five-Year Strategy:

1. We will provide consistently high-quality care closer to home.

2. With our partners in North London and each borough we will ensure equity of outcome for all

3. We will offer great places to work, providing staff with supportive environment to deliver outstanding care.

4. We will be more effective as an organisation by pioneering research, quality improvement and technology.

Why NLFT?
• We develop and retain our staff through leadership behaviours and managers programme and many more opportunities.
• We promote flexible working and support staff with a range of health and wellbeing initiatives.
• NHS Discounts, generous annual leave and NHS pension scheme
• Excellent internal staff network

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Clinical responsibilities include the provision of psychological assessments of referred clients, and the formulation and implementation of psychological treatment and management plans for a range of problems of severity and complexity. The post holder will also provide psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals, to assist in the formulation, diagnosis and treatment of clients in the perinatal period. They will participate in leading on the delivery and evaluation of psychological interventions within the service.

They will liaise with other health and social care staff, from a range of agencies, in the care provided to clients and be actively involved in teaching, training and supervision. This will include supervision of clinical and counselling psychologists, trainee clinical and counselling psychologists, and, where required, of assistant psychologists or other staff providing low intensity interventions, as well as specialist consultation on psychological therapies in the context of mental health to other staff within the service and to other health and social care staff working with the client group.

The post holder will also have opportunities in management, policy and service development as well as research, audit and service evaluation.

They will maintain and develop the highest standards of practice, through active participation in continuing professional development and maintaining an active engagement with current developments in psychological practice in areas related to the post.

Person specification

Education/qualifications

Essential criteria

• Doctoral level clinical/counselling psychologist
• HCPC registration

Experience

Essential criteria

• Perinatal or child & family work
• MDT working

Skills

Essential criteria

• Post-doctoral training in evidence-based psychological therapy

Desirable criteria

• Trauma therapy training, e.g. NET, CFT, EMDR
• Parent-Infant therapy training, e.g. CoS, VIG

References will be required to cover your last 3 years of employment/training. One has to be from your current or most recent employer and the others from your previous employer. The references should be from persons with management responsibility or HR.

If you have been unemployed for a period of four years or more, please give the details of your last employer and one character referee of your choice (not members of your family). If more applicable, references will be requested from your teacher or head of faculty. Please ensure you provide full contact details.

Vacancies that are advertised as Fixed Term Contracts will also be available as secondment opportunities for substantive internal staff.

Please be aware that your documents eg. Passport/NI Card, will be electronically scanned using Home Office accredited Verification System.

Due to the high number of applications that are received for some posts, we will close vacancies before the stated closing date once the first 50 applications are received. Therefore, please apply as soon as possible.

All non-medical posts with the Trust are subject to a probationary period of six months, during which time you will be required to demonstrate to the Trust's satisfaction, your suitability for the position in which you will be employed.

Should you not hear from us within three working weeks of the closing date for this post, then regretfully in this instance, you have not been shortlisted.

By applying for this role, you accept in the event you are successful that your personal data may be transferred from the Trust to another NHS organisation where your employment transfers within the NHS. This is in accordance with the streamlining programme which is aimed at improving efficiencies within the NHS both to make costs savings for NHS organisations but also to save you time when your employment transfers.

Employer certification / accreditation badges

Applicant requirements

You must have appropriate UK professional registration.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Documents to download

• Maple Band 8a JD&PS (PDF, 448.4KB)
• Maple Band 8a JD&PS (PDF, 448.4KB)
• Functional requirements (PDF, 296.6KB)
• A comprehensive guide for candidates (PDF, 875.7KB)