Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist

We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic, motivated and experienced Clinical Psychologist to join our CAMHS Neurodevelopmental Team. The team works with young people with a diagnosed moderate to severe Learning Disability as well as providing assessment and treatment for young people with Autism and ADHD. The team provides mental health assessments and psychological therapies for co-morbid mental health disorders.

The ideal candidate will have a strong team work ethic, sense of accountability and leadership skills, accompanied by an ability to work under considerable pressure at times. This post is open to qualified clinical psychologists with the right attributes and experience to enhance the team.

If you are looking for a new challenge, enjoy variety in your work and wish to be part of a team striving to make a difference for our community by supporting people with neurodevelopmental disorders and co-morbid mental health issues then we want to hear from you. The post will be based in the Central Cambridgeshire area covering Huntingdonshire and Fenland.

Main duties of the job To provide a qualified, highly specialist psychology service to children and adolescents with a neurodevelopmental disorder.

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.

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

Our clinical teams deliver a wide range of NHS services across inpatient, primary care and community settings, including children's, adult and older people's mental health, forensic and specialist mental health, learning disabilities, primary care and liaison psychiatry, substance misuse, social care, and research and development.

To achieve our goals, we recruit high calibre candidates who share our vision and values. As an equal opportunities' employer, we welcome applications from all sections of the community, particularly under represented groups including people with long term conditions and members of our ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ communities.

All appointments are subject to the successful completion of a probationary period.

Please note we reserve the right to close adverts early should we receive sufficient applications.

Regrettably, we cannot offer sponsorship for all roles. If you apply for a post that does not attract sponsorship, your application will be withdrawn from the process.

For further information on CPFT, please visit our website at

Detailed job description and main responsibilities Please refer to the attached job description and person specification for full details of 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 lead and participate in the Neurodevelopmental Service.
• 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.

Person specification Education / Qualifications

• Doctoral level training in Clinical, Educational or Counselling psychology
• HCPC Registered
• Undertaken training in the supervision of trainee clinical psychologists.
• Specific training in models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology as accredited by the HCPC.

Experience

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment, formulation and treatment of clients across the full range of care settings, including outpatient, community, primary care and in-patient 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, maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse and the threat of physical abuse.
• Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for client's psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified clinician and also within the context of a multidisciplinary care-plan.
• Demonstrate further specialist training/experience.
• Experience of working with children with a learning disability.
• Experience of working with people with an autistic spectrum disorder.
• Experience of the application of clinical psychology in different social and cultural contexts.

Skills & Abilities

• Able to demonstrate commitment to high quality care and service provision.
• Excellent clinical skills of psychological assessment, formulation, intervention and evaluation frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration. This requires the use of highly developed analytical and judgement skills.
• Well-developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, complex, highly technical and/or clinically sensitive information, including contentious and potentially highly distressing information, to clients, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Skills in individual and group work and in programme planning.
• Ability to identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance, including regular supervision, to support and maintain clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour.
• Knowledge of legislation in relation to the client group and its implications for both clinical practice and professional management in relation to the client group.
• Doctorate level knowledge of research methodology, research design and complex, multivariate data analysis as practiced within the clinical fields of psychology.
• Highly developed knowledge of lifespan developmental psychology and models of psychopathology and learning relevant to children and young people.
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies in child and adolescent/ children with learning disability.
• High level knowledge of the theory and practice of at least two specialised psychological therapies.

Here at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) we are dedicated to providing high quality care with compassion. We deliver many of the NHS services that are provided outside of hospital and in the community such as physical, mental health and specialist services.

We are a health and social care organisation, offering a wide range of services . click apply for full job details