Clinical Associate Psychologist

To provide a direct specialist psychological/psychological service to adult and older adult service users with severe mental health needs, (including complex needs associated with personality disorders/emotional sensitivity within the Primary and Community Mental Health programme), their families and carers.

To provide specialist psychological assessment and therapy advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to psychologist/therapist colleagues, non-psychologist colleagues and other, carers; to work autonomously within professional/voluntary sector colleagues guidelines and the overall framework of the teams’ policies and procedures.

To develop and maintain effective working relations within the multidisciplinary team.

To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.
- Provide a range of psychological treatments working within their scope of practice, whilst the supervising Clinical Psychologist retains overall clinical responsibility for their work, reporting to a Clinical Psychologist in terms of psychological assessment, formulation and intervention
- Carry out risk assessments in relation to psychological distress and to ensure that risk formulations are integrated with interventions understanding contingency management and the use of risk indicators in mitigating against crises
- Develop collaborative formulations with patients so as to sense-check understandings and influence delivery of evidenced-based individualised psychological interventions.
- To understand of the needs and assets of individuals and families from a wide range of racial, cultural, sexual, religious and social backgrounds. To join with service users and colleagues, co-produce innovative ways of communicating and working across language and cultural differences.
- Work as part of a multidisciplinary community team or in specialised clinical settings and liaise with relevant external agencies to facilitate and enable psychological interventions
- Provide training for others to inform and support psychological models of change and interventions
- Understand impact of multiple perspectives within the context of multidisciplinary teams

Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust is a major employer and provider of services. Our Service Users, Carers and Staff are central, and our Values are important, to the delivery of high-quality care. We actively seek out individuals who share these values:

- Working together for service users
- Respect and kindness
- Everyone counts
- Commitment to quality
- Improving lives

The post holder will provide psychological interventions to the Primary Care Networks Mental Health Services. In particular, those with complex mental health problems, focusing on strength and assets to help people with what matters most to them.

This work will be under the supervision of a qualified clinical psychologist who will retain clinical responsibility for clinical work carried out, provided that the clinical work is within the care plan specified.

The characteristics of the core population receiving direct services are: people with complex psychological and emotional needs who may have experienced adverse life events. Those with serious mental illness, for example complex trauma personality disorder, psychosis, schizophrenia and complex depression and anxiety (the list is not exhaustive).

Psychological based provision is offered to the local/identified population at the individual, group, couple and family level through to teams, systems and community level.

The post holder will work with people who use our services to develop a shared understanding of the complex issues the person is facing, how they cope and the impact this has on their mental, physical health and well-being and those around them (psychological assessment and formulation). Under supervision of qualified clinical psychologists they will explore social, psychological, therapies and other potential options which may improve health outcomes and help them achieve agreed goals.

Service users seen by the post holder will include those who have experienced high levels of distress and complex mental health difficulties. Service users may present with a high level of risk to both themselves and sometimes to other people. Assessments and interventions will be delivered in a range of settings, including community, VCSE as well as clinics and in person, by telephone or digital platform.

The post holder would be expected to work closely with experts-by-experience, local communities, Community and Voluntary and Social Enterprises, to co-produce and co-develop services. The post holder will primarily be involved in partnership working, liaising with various stakeholders in the system, e.g. GPs, primary and secondary care mental health services, colleges and universities, and the 3rd sector. The post holder will also be involved in raising the awareness