Clinical Psychologist

Job summary

Are you passionate about working with children and young people with complex mental health and neurodevelopmental needs? Are you committed to reflective and anti-discriminatory practice? Do you want to be part of an innovative, supportive and engaging team?

The Autism and Learning Disabilities Team is seeking a highly motivated and committed Clinical Psychologist with excellent interpersonal and communication skills. The post-holder will provide their psychological expertise to multi-disciplinary clinical assessments, interventions and reviews of service effectiveness. Interventions that may be provided include research- and evidence-informed approaches that make a difference for the children, young people and families we work with.

This is an exciting time to be joining the service in terms of the strategic aims in the NHS Long Term Plan to ensure that all people with a learning disability, autism or both can live happier, healthier and longer lives.

This is a fixed-term role for 10 months.

Main duties of the job

The post-holder will be expected to offer highly specialised assessments and interventions with children and young people with disabilities and their parents/carers, within a multidisciplinary context. For this role, there is also a particular emphasis on diagnostic assessment for young people where there are concerns about social communication and interaction as well as their mental health. Relatedly, the post-holder will also support the management of the autism assessment waiting list and utilise their research skills to carry out audits and service evaluations relevant to the service.

Professional supervision is provided by the discipline and the post-holder will also be responsible for clinically supervising and managing the workload of assistant psychologists and other more junior members of staff within the service.

The team works with children and young people up to the age of 25 and has a long-standing national and international reputation for the application of psychodynamic psychotherapies and other evidence-informed approaches to meet the mental health needs of this client group. We are keen to develop our offer further and to support staff to develop innovative clinical practice in assessment and treatment, including group work as appropriate.

About us

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist mental health trust with a focus on training and education alongside a full range of mental health services and psychological therapies for children and their families, young people and adults.

We are committed to improving mental health and emotional wellbeing, believing that high quality mental health services should be available for all who need them. We bring a distinctive contribution based on the importance we attach to social experience at all stages of people's lives, and our focus on psychological and developmental approaches to the promotion of health and the prevention and treatment of mental ill health

We contribute to the pool of ideas through our own research and development, but are also committed to bringing together the best ideas of the time, old and new, from inside and out, together with the most gifted and able professionals in our fields of endeavour. We aim to share our ideas and practice through as many routes as possible.

As a Trust we aim constantly to be evolving in nature and form in relation to the environment in which we work, to ensure that our contribution remains relevant.

The Trust uses electronic new starter forms on Trac to collect personal details. Information collected is securely stored and used to set up the employee record on the ESR HR system.