Clinical or Counselling Psychologist - Barnet HTT & Beacon Day Service

Thank you for your interest in the North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT). It 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.

Job Overview

To provide a specialist clinical psychology service to clients served by the North Central London Home Treatment Team and Beacon Day Service. This will include providing psychological assessment and short-term individual and group therapy to clients, including risk assessment and management. To offer advice, consultation, and supervision on clients' psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and to other, non-professional carers. To work autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team's policies and procedures. To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

The post holder may provide clinical supervision to assistant psychologists and non-psychologists.

The post holder will make positive contributions to any future service developments and the delivery of high-quality, evidence-based and evidence-informed care pathways. This may include training or teaching of other staff.

Main Duties of the Job

The post holder will be based between St Ann's and Edgware Community Hospital as the post is split between two linked but separate teams, both covering patients from the North Central London area.

The work is with children, young people, and families who present with high risk to themselves and/or others and who will be difficult to engage in standard outpatient services. The multidisciplinary teams provide rapid, flexible, and accessible services to address urgent and acute problems facing children and young people, by providing a 'hospital from home' approach and a therapeutic day service.

You will work therapeutically with young people, and parents/carers, in both individual and group settings. There will also be a role for supporting psychological thinking within the multi-disciplinary team via team meetings, consultation, case discussion, and teaching.

A capacity to work with emotionally intense, demanding, and challenging situations is needed. Home or hospital visits are part of the work for the Home Treatment Team, whereas the Day Service is static.

The post holder will need to employ frequent and intense concentration during their work.

On occasions, the post holder may be required to use their own vehicle to attend meetings or as part of their clinical role.

There is a need to use effective and efficient keyboard skills in the recording of clinical information and in communicating with colleagues.

Working for Our Organisation

The partnership between Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (BEH) and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust (C&I) is going from strength to strength since it was originally established in 2021 forming the North London Mental Health Partnership.

BEH manages the renowned North London Forensic Services (NLFS), which is the lead provider of forensic mental health services; it manages the devolved New Models of care budget, delivers mental health care across some of the prisons, and provides mental health services as HM Young Offenders Institutions in Aylesbury.

Detailed Job Description and Main Responsibilities

Please kindly refer to the job description and person specification by clicking on the JD/PS attachment in the advert.

Person Specification

Qualifications/ Registrations

Essential Criteria

• Doctoral level training in clinical or counselling psychology (or its equivalent for those trained prior to 1996), including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies, and lifespan developmental psychology as accredited by the BPS.
• Registration with the HCPC as a clinical or counselling psychologist.

Desirable Criteria

• Additional post-doctoral training in evidence-based therapies e.g. CBT, systemic therapy, and EMDR.

Experience

Essential Criteria

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment and treatment of young people and adolescents with mental health difficulties and learning difficulties across the full range of care settings, including outpatient, community, primary care, and inpatient settings.
• 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.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience of working in consultation and collaboratively with Social Care Teams.
• Experience of working within a service with young people in crisis.
• Experience of teaching, training, and/or supervision.
• Experience of the application of clinical/counselling psychology in different cultural contexts.
• Experience of working in the NHS.

Skills/ Abilities

Essential Criteria

• Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment, intervention, and management frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration. Doctoral level knowledge of research methodology, research design, and complex, multivariate data analysis as practiced within the clinical fields of psychology. Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS. Good organisational and time management skills, ability to plan and prioritise own workload.
• Well-developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers, and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Doctoral level knowledge of research methodology, research design, and complex, multivariate data analysis as practiced within the clinical fields of psychology.
• Skills in providing consultation to other professional and non-professional groups.
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS. Good organisational and time management skills, ability to plan and prioritise own workload.

Desirable Criteria

• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in specific difficult-to-treat groups (e.g. personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities, etc). High-level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies.
• Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and mental health.

Personal Qualities

Essential Criteria

• Experience of working within a multicultural framework. Experience of group work. Willingness to work flexibly. Car driver desirable. Ability to teach and train others, using a variety of complex multi-media materials suitable for presentations within public, professional, and academic settings.

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 e.g. 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

• Job description and person specification (PDF, 456.4KB)
• Functional Requirements PDF (PDF, 258.0KB)