Senior Clinical Psychologist in Burns | Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust

We cover the whole lifespan – from neonates to centenarians - and includes those with recent and historical injuries and other skin loss conditions.

We see many patients for whom English is not their first language and regularly work with interpreters. The position would suit someone with experience of working with PTSD, preferably EMDR treatment. EMDR supervision is available. We offer a range of interventions from one-off screens, psychoeducation, brief interventions (2-4), planned treatment (6-12) and longer-term work (13+).

We are committed to increasing patient involvement in our services and aim to have a patient representative on our interview panel.

The post holder will be part of a small psychology team, embedded within the adult and paediatric burns MDT, working closely and collaboratively to deliver high quality, evidence based and effective psychological care to burns patients at all stages of their injury and recovery.

The role includes the provision of specialist psychological assessment and therapy and advice and consultation on clients' psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and to other, non-professional carers.

The post holder will work autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team's policies and procedures.

The post holder will utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

The successful applicant may have contact with patients or service users. As an NHS Trust we strongly encourage and support vaccination as this remains the best way to protect yourself, your family, your colleagues and of course patients and service users when working on our healthcare settings.

As part of both of these wider teams the successful candidate will have opportunity to network with colleagues and to be part of regular programs of teaching.

We regularly host trainee Clinical Psychologists. There is a potential requirement to cover at least one 8 AM meeting per week onsite at the hospital. Preferably the working days would include Tuesdays and Fridays.

KEY RESULT AREAS

Clinical:

1. To provide highly specialist psychological assessments of clients referred to the 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, family members and others involved in the client’s care. To analyse and interpret patient data in a time sensitive manner; ensuring assessment and treatment plans are adaptable to the current situation.
2. To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems that have been impacted or caused by their burn injury or the witnessing of a burn incident, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the client’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings. This is likely to include specific interventions to treat posttraumatic stress disorder and appearance-related distress.
3. To be responsible for implementing a range of highly complex psychological interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, within and across teams employed individually and in synthesis, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
4. 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, family or group.
5. To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the highly specialist assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
6. To provide highly specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. To act as care coordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans under enhanced CPA including clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved the network of care.
10. To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, complex information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care. To use highly skilled interpersonal communication, recognizing that the environment may be hostile and/or sensitive depending on the nature of the burn incident.

1. To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues.
2. To develop skills in the area of professional post-graduate teaching, training and supervision and to provide supervision to other MDT staff’s psychological work, as appropriate.
3. To provide specialist clinical placements for psychologists in training when possible.
4. To teach and support trainees to facilitate their acquisition of required clinical competencies and research skills and to continue to the assessment and evaluation of these competencies.
5. To provide professional and clinical supervision of assistant/graduate psychologists and, as appropriate, to contribute to the supervision of individual cases for trainee clinical psychologists.
6. To contribute to the pre- and post-qualification teaching of clinical and/or counselling psychology, as required by the head of specialty.
7. To provide advice, consultation and training to staff working with the client group across a range of agencies and settings, where appropriate.

1. To actively participate in the development, evaluation and monitoring of the team’s operational policies and services, through the deployment of professional skills in research, service evaluation and audit.
2. To advise both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing.
3. To manage the workloads of assistant and graduate psychologists, within the framework of the team/service’s policies and procedures.
4. To be involved, as appropriate, in the shortlisting and interviewing of assistant/graduate psychologists.
5. To provide clinical and management supervision of assistant psychologists and trainees as appropriate within the Burns Psychology service.
6. To represent the Burns Psychology service at senior level meetings, supporting the Lead Psychologist and acting autonomously in the absence of the Lead Psychologist.

1. To utilise theory, evidence-based literature and research to support evidence based practice in individual work and work with other team members.
2. To undertake appropriate research and provide research advice to other staff undertaking research, in line with supporting the organisation’s research objectives.
3. To participate in the preparation of clinical and research data for publication in academic journals and presentation at scientific meetings.
4. Where appropriate to collaborate with relevant academic, medical staff and allied health professionals in conducting research relevant to the clinical areas and for improving service development.
5. To undertake project management, including complex audit and service evaluation, with colleagues within the service to help develop service provision.
6. To familiarise themselves with, and to comply with, the Trust’s requirements on research governance.

1. To enter data as required into patient records systems such as LastWord (EPR), Evolve and Cerner.
2. To maintain personal records including clinical observations, test and research results and work records in computerised and manual forms.
3. To enter data into spreadsheets as required including statistical programmes and to carry out high level statistical processing of data.
4. The post holder will engage in relevant computer and IT training as required.
5. The post holder will be responsible for ensuring that those psychologists they are responsible for/supervise engage in relevant computer and IT training as required and will input and maintain, appropriate computer and manual clinical records and statistical data.

1. To contribute to the development, and dissemination of the highest professional standards of practice, through active participation in internal and external CPD training and development programmes, in consultation with the post holder’s professional and service manager(s).
2. To contribute to the development and articulation of best practice in psychology across the service, by continuing to develop the skills of a reflexive and reflective scientist practitioner, taking part in regular professional supervision and appraisal and maintaining an active engagement with current developments in the field of clinical psychology and related disciplines.
3. To maintain the highest standards of clinical record keeping including electronic data entry and recording, report writing and the responsible exercise of professional self-governance in accordance with professional codes of practice of the British Psychological Society and Trust policies and procedures.
4. To actively participate and contribute to regularly scheduled education meetings of Burns Psychology, Clinical Health Psychology, Paediatric Psychology meetings and the LSEBN Psychosocial network.
5. To maintain up to date knowledge of legislation, national and local policies and issues in relation to both the specific client group and mental health.
6. To frequently require high levels of concentration, processing of complex clinical information, including end of life care. To rapidly adapt the psychological intervention according to clinical presentation.

This advert closes on Monday 28 Oct 2024