Job description

Exciting new opportunity for Clinical/Counselling Psychologists in the MINT teams in Ealing,West London NHS Trust

We are seeking a Band 8B Clinical or Counselling psychologist to work with our new Mental Health Integrated Network (MINT) teams. These teams are innovative and cover both primary and secondary care adult mental health provision.

The post involves providing psychological assessments and treatment to adults with a wide range of problems, including Personality Difficulties, Complex Trauma, Psychosis and other mood disorders. It also involves broader liaison and joint working with services including IAPT and external agencies to deliver on supporting psychological needs in a variety of ways.

The post-holder will hold a lead role in ensuring that all members of multidisciplinary teams have access to a psychologically informed way of thinking and formulation about different client groups.

This includes having a lead role in ensuring the delivery of psychological treatments alongside providing consultation, facilitating joint work and contributing to the dissemination of psychological research and theory.

Furthermore, they will offer clinical supervision and line management to less senior members of the psychology team.

The post holder will have oversight of the psychology team, which works closely with three MDTs in Ealing. S/he would be expected to contribute to the development and delivery of treatment pathways within these teams, and to support the teams more generally in formulating and caring for service users.

The psychology team aims to offer a range of evidence-based treatments for the aforementioned disorders, including EMDR, DBT, and CBT for psychosis. Training in all these therapies is made available, delivered by expert external providers, and supported with the necessary specialist supervision.

This post is a leadership post within the wider MINT psychology team, covering the three MINT teams in Ealing. The psychology team includes clinical and counselling psychologists, CBT therapists, and clinical associate psychologists, as well as students and trainees. We work together in delivering evidence based group therapies and fostering space for reflective practice. You will also develop close working relationships with other local psychologists in related services.

West London NHS Trust is one of the most diverse providers of mental health, community and social care in the UK.

Our 3,982 staff care for people in hospital and in the community, helping them to recover and go on to lead full and productive lives. We aim to be the best organisation of our kind in the country.

We provide care and treatment for more than 800,000 people living in the London boroughs of Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow, delivering services in the community (at home, in GP surgeries and care homes), hospital, specialist clinics and forensic (secure) units.

We’re rated good overall by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Together, we’re committed to promoting hope and wellbeing, working with patients, service users, carers, families and partners across the communities we serve.

We are keen to ensure that our workforce reflects the community it serves, particularly in terms of ethnicity, gender, disability, LGBTQ+ and experience of mental illness.

The post-holder will contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all service users of the service, across all settings and agencies serving the client group.

The post-holder will be responsible, as the principal psychologist of the psychology service, for the provision of a full and comprehensive specialist psychology service to culturally diverse service users with severe and enduring mental health disorders. They will contribute to meetings where referrals and service users’ presentations are discussed, providing specialist psychological assessments and therapies and advice on risk management, and consultation to other colleagues’ involved in service user’s care. Furthermore, the psychological support includes a well-developed group programme with groups for different levels of mental health and emotional difficulties.

The post holder will work closely with the lead psychologists and head of psychological therapies to further develop and evaluate the psychological provision among Ealing MINT teams. The post holder will utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service.

As an autonomous practitioner s/he will be responsible for their own work and interventions and for the interpretation of agreed guidelines and policies.