Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist

This is an exciting opportunity for a qualified Clinical or Counselling Psychologist to join theCAMHS Neurodevelopmental Team.The team works with young people with children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders (autism spectrum disorder, learning disability and/or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and moderate to severe mental health difficulties (aged up to 18 years old).

Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust is a health & social care organisation dedicated to providing high quality care with compassion to improve the health & wellbeing of the people we care for, as well as supporting & empowering them to lead a fulfilling life.

Our clinical teams deliver many NHS services not only via inpatient and primary care setting but also with the community. These services include Children, Adult & Older Peoples mental & physical health, Forensic & Specialist mental health, Learning Disabilities, Primary Care & Liaison psychiatry, Substance misuse, Social care, Research & Development.

Please refer to the attached job description and person specification for full details of responsibilities

Job Purpose
- To provide a qualified, highly specialist clinical psychology service to children and adolescents with a neurodevelopmental condition.
- To provide highly specialist psychological assessment and therapy at the same time as offering advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to both professional colleagues and staff from other agencies. To work autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of both the Trust’s and the neurodevelopmental pathway’s policies and procedures.
- To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service

Key Responsibilities
- To provide highly specialist psychological assessments of children and adolescents referred to the Neurodevelopmental team, based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with clients, their families and others involved in the client’s care (including professionals from other agencies).
- To individually formulate, plan, implement and evaluate plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health or other complex psychological problems based on an appropriate conceptual framework adapting/utilising several psychological models and employing methods of proven efficacy, across a range of care settings.
- To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individual children and young people, families/carers, and via groups, within and across teams, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing on different explanatory models including developmental, cognitive, learning theory, biological, neuropsychological, and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
- To provide specialist child neuropsychology assessments, providing advice and consultation based on this information to neurodevelopmental professionals, clients and their families and other agency professionals (especially education) as appropriate.
- To participate in the ASD assessment clinic.
- To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options, taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual and their family and/or carers.
- To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, psychological formulation, treatment and discharge of own clients, and to manage and maintain caseload in line with service requirements.
- To provide highly specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
- To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving these children and their families.
- To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of own (caseholder) clients and/or carers and to monitor progress during the course of both uni
- and multi-disciplinary care and joint work with other agencies.
- To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, to clients, family/carers and others as appropriate, information that may be contentious or highly distressing concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care.
- To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management i