Principal Clinical/Counselling Psychologist.

Job overview

We are looking for a highly motivated and experienced Clinical/Counselling Psychologist to join the leadership team in our Home Treatment  service in Sheffield.  The team works with a range of partner agencies, including GP’s and VCSE organisations, to deliver interventions and treatment to people with a range of mental health difficulties in crisis including those with serious mental illness with a focus on reducing risk and avoiding hospital admission. The successful candidate will join a large team of supportive multi-professionals alongside  clinical psychologists, psychotherapists and clinical associate psychologists within the acute and inpatient psychology team.

This is an exciting opportunity for someone who has experience of working into clinical, operational and leadership roles. There are ongoing opportunities in the service to shape the psychology clinical pathway and the successful applicant will be actively involved in service development. The role will involve the co–ordination and organisation of the work of psychologists/ psychotherapists and other clinical members of the team to provide high quality psychologically-based care and treatment. The post holder will maintain a clinical caseload, provide clinical supervision, reflective practice and debrief and will actively work with other clinical leads in the service. The psychology team is research active and has close links with Sheffield University.

Main duties of the job

To provide clinical leadership and operational management for the Psychology team within the Home Treatment and urgent and crisis service in Sheffield.

To provide clinical supervision and line management to psychologists/psychotherapists, clinical associate psychologists, mental health and wellbeing practitioners, assistant(s), trainee(s) and other professionals (where required). You will be responsible for the systematic governance of psychological practice and the co–ordination and organisation of the work of your team.

You will support the team to monitor waiting lists and will support the co-ordination of resources available to the team by responding to referrals, making autonomous professional and clinical judgements based upon complex information, prioritising accordingly and contributing to multidisciplinary decision making. You will also utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research.

To deliver psychological assessment, formulation, and interventions in-line with evidence-based practice, though keeping client need at the heart of the work and offer highly specialised advice and consultation on service users’ psychological care.

To advise on and support the management of demand and capacity within the service.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

To lead on psychological care pathways development, using best evidence and co-production to create effective, well received, trauma informed patient pathways through the service along with the rest of the leadership team.

To line manage (including supervising and performance managing the work of) psychological staff within the framework of the team / service’s policies and procedures.

To provide highly specialist assessments, formulations and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a service user’s problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the person’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across a full range of care settings.

To provide highly specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals (both psychologists/ psychotherapists and non-psychologists) contributing directly to service users’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plans.

To contribute directly and indirectly to a trauma informed, psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all users of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the service user group.

To significantly contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of aspects of the team’s clinical practice through the deployment of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit.

To co-ordinate the systematic governance of psychological practice within the team by developing and collecting relevant measures of outcome and audit, and to provide consultation to other health and social care professionals to enable them to develop their own effective systems of governance.

To significantly contribute to the development, evaluation and monitoring of all psychological aspects of operational development in collaboration with the senior operational leads and Consultant Psychologist.

To propose policy or service changes which impact beyond own area of activity by participation inService/ Trust working parties and other local development groups.

To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence-based practice in individual work and work with other team members.

(see job description for full details)