Specialist Clinical Psychologist/Family Therapist (CLA&Return Home)

Job summary

This is an exciting opportunity for a clinician with experience of working with Children Looked After (CLA) to join an experienced CAMHS team that is co-located with Children's Social Care. This specialist role will be across two services areas:

• delivering our core clinical model in CLA and Fostering
• supporting reunification of children and young people with their birth families.

The core clinical role has a consultative focus, including offering group and individual consultation to Social Workers. The role will have a small clinical caseload of direct work with CLA, carers and birth parents.

This role has an exciting additional focus on reunification. It will involve both direct and indirect clinical intervention with young people, birth parents and the wider network to support successful reunification.

Our work is framed within a stepped model of care; and is guided by Islington CLA's Practice Models (DDP, Mentalisation, Motivational Practice, Return Home).

We are a dynamic, multidisciplinary team and offer opportunities for continued professional development and reflective practice.

We encourage applications from all sections of the community to develop a team which is more representative of our client groups.

Main duties of the job

• To provide specialist mental health advice and consultation to social workers in the Children Looked After Service to support their practice and management of young people presenting with a range of presentations and needs.
• To attend group supervision, sharing clinical and mental health knowledge and expertise to contribute to case discussion.
• To facilitate consultations with social workers and supervising social workers, to enhance their trauma-informed, relationship based-practice with children and caregivers.
• To provide specialist mental health assessment, formulation and interventions with children, young people and care-givers.
• To provide specialist evidence-based intervention for looked after children and carers, drawing on innovative ways of engagement and intervention.
• To provide specialist evidence-based interventions for birth parents which will aid reunification, including processing of their experiences of having a child removed and relational work to rebuild the parent-child relationship.
• To formulate and devise clinical management plans for a range of specialist psychological interventions; individual, family and group.
• To provide reports and communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, as required.
• To liaise with professionals in health, mental health, education, social care and voluntary sector services, as required.

About us

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.

Person Specification

Essential

• Post-graduate Qualification in: Clinical Psychology, Family and Systemic Psychotherapy
• Registration with relevant professional body: UKCP, HCP, BAP, ACP
• Experience of working with looked after children
• Experience of offering consultation and reflective practice to professionals outside of mental health

Desirable

• Advanced clinical skills qualifications eg Dyadic Development Psychotherapy/ Mentalisation based approaches
• Discipline specific supervisor training

Skills & Abilities

Essential

• Ability and skills to offer consultation to professionals individually and in group
• Ability to work with complex professional networks
• Ability to manage within a busy and challenging context, drawing on trauma informed practice for self- care and to support social care colleagues
• Skills and experience in psychological assessment, formulation and interventions with looked after children
• Skills and experience in assessment and management of mental health risk
• Skills and experience in adhering to clinical governance requirements to a high standard (outcome measuring, record keeping, effective communication)
• Skills and experience in developing and delivering training
• Skills and experience working in social care or other multiagency setting

Desirable

• Skills and experience working with parental / adult mental health

Knowledge & Experience

Essential

• Significant knowledge and experience of clinical work with young people looked after, leaving care and their carers
• Knowledge and experience of attachment based and trauma informed models of clinical practice
• Extensive post qualifying experience working with adolescents and young adults in a Mental Health setting
• Experience of delivering a mental health service in a social care or other multiagency setting.

Desirable

• Experience working in adult mental health
• Training . familiarisation with Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, Motivational Practice and NSPCC Reunification Framework
• Experience of delivering clinical interventions to support reunification of CLA to birth family

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the .

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. .
UK Registration

Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see

Employer details

Employer name

Whittington Hospital NHS Trust
Address

Islington Social Care, 3 Elwood Street

Elwood Street, London, N5 1EB

London

N5 1EB

Employer's website