Clinical Psychologist/Counselling Psychologist

• To offer specialist psychological assessment and intervention to patients attending the service
• To provide specialist advice, guidance, and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients formulation, diagnosis, and treatment plan.
• To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a clients mental health problems based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the clients problems.
• To be responsible for implementing psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups.
• To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options, considering both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
• 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 the client group.
• 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.
• To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of treatment.

Essential

• Post-graduate doctoral level training in clinical or counselling psychology or its equivalent as accredited by the BPS, including specifically models of psychopathology, clinical psychometrics and neuropsychology, two or more distinct psychological therapies and lifespan developmental psychology.
• Registration with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) as a Practitioner Clinical or Counselling Psychologist

Essential

• Assessed experience of working in a CMHT or similar complex care service working with patients with complexity and co-morbidity
• Relevant experience of exercising clinical responsibility for clients' psychological care and treatment, within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
• Experience of teaching, training and/or professional and clinical supervision.

Desirable

• Experience of representing Psychology within the context of multi-disciplinary care.
• Experience of assessing and treating clients across the full range of care settings.
• Experience of supervising other mental health staff.
• Experience of providing psychological support to service users with psychotic symptoms

Essential

• Skills in the use of complex methods of psychological assessment intervention and management frequently requiring sustained and intense concentration.
• Well-developed skills in the ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, highly technical, and clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Post-Qualification practice of CBT or other evidence-based psychological therapies.
• Skills in providing consultation to other professional and nonprofessional groups.
• Doctoral level knowledge of research design and methodology, as practiced within the field of clinical psychology.
• Knowledge of legislation and policy in relation to the client group and mental health.
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the BPS.

Desirable

• Well-developed knowledge of the theory and practice of specialized psychological for psychosis and difficult to treat groups (e.g. personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities etc).
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of highly specialized psychological therapies and assessment methodologies.
• Post-qualification training and accreditation in CBT or other evidence-based psychological therapies