Parent Infant Psychotherapist OR Family Systemic Psychotherapist

Thank you for your interest for the North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT), it is an exciting time to join us and being part of our journey to improve mental health care across North London and deliver excellent services to our local people. We will achieve this through the North London Way, as we:

• Collaborate at every level by living our Values to create the right conditions for us all to work together.
• Develop our new Trust culture, to help make our new Trust a great place to work and to receive great care.
• Empower our teams to lead the planned improvements in our services, by skilling them and giving them the tools to make the changes.
• Focus on delivering excellence at every level to improve our performance and ensure consistently high-quality care across all our services.
• Ensure that research, Quality Improvement, and technology lead the way and are embedded in our services.
• Take a trauma informed approach to everything we do

We proactively welcome diversity in our workforce and pride ourselves on being an inclusive employer. We aim to recruit from our local communities and provide opportunities to all including apprenticeships, veterans, care leavers and more.

The North London Way to deliver, Better Mental Health, Better Lives, Better Communities.

Our trust website is: https://www.northlondonmentalhealth.nhs.uk/

Job overview

The service works in partnership with other services involved with families who are pregnant or have an infant/young child under the age of 5.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will be able to demonstrate that they have a commitment to perinatal and parent-infant / infant mental health and relevant experience of working therapeutically with parents and babies. It is desirable that the post-holder can demonstrate training in parent-infant therapeutic work (e.g. parent-infant psychotherapy, video feedback interventions for assessment and intervention with parents and babies).

This post will involve travelling between family centres and the CAMHS base in Enfield and travel outside the borough to meet with other colleagues within the wider Tri-Borough (Haringey and Barnet).

Working for our organisation

North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) is committed to improving mental health care across North London to deliver excellent services to our local people.

Our Five-Year Strategy:

1. We will provide consistently high-quality care closer to home.
2. With our partners in North London and each borough we will ensure equity of outcome for all
3. We will offer great places to work, providing staff with supportive environment to deliver outstanding care.
4. We will be more effective as an organisation by pioneering research, quality improvement and technology.

The Trust reserves the right to require staff to work at such other places or locations as it considers reasonable and necessary on a temporary or permanent basis.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To provide generic mental health and specialist Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic/ Systemic assessments of children and their families/carers referred to the 0-5 team, drawing on a variety of sources including psychological self-report measures and rating scales, as well as direct and indirect clinical observations and semi-structured interviews with clients, family members and others involved in the client’s care.
• To formulate and implement plans for the treatment and/or management of the child and their family’s mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the presenting problem(s), and employing methods of proven efficacy, across the full range of care settings, in consultation with the Multidisciplinary Team (MDT).
• To reflect upon assessments and treatment formulations adjusting and refining them, drawing upon different explanatory models, and maintaining several provisional hypotheses.
• To be responsible, in consultation with the Clinical Pathway Lead, for implementing a range of interventions for children and their families/carers, within and across teams, appropriate to your specialism (psychodynamic/psychoanalytic or systemic psychotherapy)
• To provide assessment and discharge care planning to families of young children and infants as part of a local protocol and rota.
• 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 child/young person, family, or group.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of children and families whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.
• To provide specialist advice from your clinical model/ attachment-based models, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to the development of formulation, diagnosis, and treatment plans.
• To ensure that all members of the multi-disciplinary team have access to a therapeutically based framework for understanding the care needs of children and their families from a therapeutic perspective, through the provision of advice and consultation and the dissemination of psychological research and theory and specifically from the perspective of your specialist model.

This is not an exhaustive list, please see the attached Job Description and Person Specification for more information on the role requirements and duties.

Person specification

Qualifications/ Registration

• Doctoral level training in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, (or its equivalent for those trained prior to the introduction of training doctorates) providing membership to the Association of Child Psychotherapists OR Masters degree in Family Systemic Psychotherapy with appropriate registration as a Family Systemic Psychotherapist with AFT/UKCP

• Post-qualification training in one or more additional specialized areas of therapeutic practice (relevant to parent infant work)
• Specialist training in supervision that has led to ‘approved’ clinical supervisor status

Skills/Abilities

• Advanced skills in using a wide variety of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic / Systemic theories and interventions and the ability to use these appropriately in relation to client need and work setting.
• Advanced 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,
• Skills in communicating complex, highly technical &/or clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers, and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Advanced skills in providing consultation to other professional groups and non-professional groups.
• Advanced skills in professional supervision; skills for offering live supervision of multi-disciplinary colleagues.
• Advanced Knowledge of child development particularly in preschool children and the perinatal period.
• Ability to work with a racially and culturally diverse community in a wide variety of contexts including advanced specialist skills for working therapeutically in family homes.
• Up-to-date knowledge of relevant legislation, ethical issues and strategic frameworks including The Children Act 1989, and its implications for both clinical practice and professional management.
• Ability to identify and employ methods of clinical governance as appropriate, to support and maintain clinical practice in the face of regular exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour.
• Good organisational and time management skills, ability to plan and prioritise own workload.
• Ability to be part of the recruitment process.

• Advanced skills in professional supervision to meet ACP/ UKCP/AFT requirements.
• Advanced Skills for offering live supervision to multi-disciplinary colleagues.
• Experience of group work.
• Knowledge of research methodology consistent with Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic or Systemic practice.

Experience/ Knowledge

• Must have significant experience of working as a qualified Family Systemic or Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, including experience within the designated specialty where the post is located (0-5 CAMHS).
• Experience of specialist Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic/ Systemic assessment, formulation and intervention with individuals and families.
• Experience of working with a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse, and the threat of physical abuse with a wide variety of client groups across the whole life course presenting problems that reflect the full range of clinical severity.
• Experience of exercising full clinical responsibility for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic/ Systemic care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care coordinator and within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
• Experience of working in a multi-disciplinary team
• Experience of the application Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic psychotherapy/ Family Systemic Psychotherapy in different cultural contexts.
• Experience of working with a range of childhood disorders at the acute and chronic stage.
• Experience of self-harm assessment and intervention with both individuals and their families.
• Experience of risk assessment and management.

• Experience of working with people (children and families) of all ages.
• Experience of teaching, training &/or supervision.
• Experience of developing services.

Personal Qualities

• Excellent interpersonal skills.
• The capacity to contain high levels of complex affect in oneself, for one’s clients and other team members.
• Supportive and positive attitude.
• Ability to manage working in highly complex situations where there are multiple difficulties, competing views about those difficulties, and take a lead in creating contexts that develop rapport, and harness the abilities of others in developing resources and solutions.
• Appreciation of the interface between personal and professional lives, high level of self-awareness and knowledge of principles of self-care.
• Ability to teach and train others, using a variety of complex multi-media materials suitable for presentations in public, professional and academic settings.
• Ability to recognise and challenge all discrimination.
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by your registering professional body.
• Ability to work as part of a team and independently.
• Experience of working within a multicultural framework.
• Willingness to work flexibly.
• An awareness of own strengths and limitations.

• Have your own car and a valid driver’s license may be required but not essential.