Detailed job description and main responsibilities

1. To provide highly specialist psychoanalytic psychotherapy assessment for children and adolescents with severe, highly complex and persistent mental health problems, and their carers/parents and families, and to make decisions about treatment options taking into account relevant evidence-based research, theory, practice and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes which have shaped the child/adolescent, their parents/carers and family.

2. To provide highly specialist brief, medium and long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for children and adolescents with severe, complex and persistent mental health problems. Due to the nature of their difficulties, these children and young people may be hard to engage, and may have received other interventions, or be working with medical or community colleagues offering physical therapist or other forms of specialist treatments. It is recognised that they may need a range of interventions that may include a more intensive and in-depth therapy to reach their deep-rooted mental health difficulties.

3. To provide in depth risk-assessments of young people who are a risk to themselves / and or others and to be able to formulate short-term crisis planning, (which may involve some outreach working), in order to provide support that will enable the young person to engage with on-going treatment at a later stage.

4. To contribute, as required, to the process of care planning for young people referred within the Generic Team and to manage a complex caseload as care coordinator working within a multi-disciplinary team which includes: psychiatry, psychology, child psychotherapy, nursing, family therapy and social work.

5. To monitor clinical progress through regular reviews of psychotherapy treatment.

6. To deliver, as required, highly specialist psychotherapeutic assessment and psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic treatment for families who are hard to engage and who may be highly dysfunctional with complex and persistent problems.

7. To provide highly specialist assessment reports for Social Care and Court where appropriate.

8. To participate and collaborate with other team members to provide specialist clinical services as required e.g. Court assessments, parenting assessments, specialist emotional state and cognitive assessments, specialist group work and assessment of trauma and depression.

9. To participate in regular CPA reviews and on-going discussion of cases in treatment with other members of the multi-disciplinary team and where appropriate, co-ordinate and organise network meetings with professionals from other agencies.

10. To be able to engage and work with children and young people with a range of learning and developmental difficulties while drawing upon a range of theoretical and practical knowledge acquired over a significant period of time (.e.g. developments in psychoanalysis, child and adolescent development, attachment theory, neuro-biology, systems theory, adult psychopathology, mentalization-based theory and thinking.)

11. To exercise autonomous professional responsibility based on the Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics of the Association of Child Psychotherapists