Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Key Tasks and Responsibilities

Clinical:

• To provide 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 formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client’s mental health problems, 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. 
•  To be responsible for implementing a range of 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.
• 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.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically-based care plans. 
• To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan. 
• 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. 
• 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. 
• To act as care coordinator, where appropriate, taking responsibility for initiating planning and review of care plans including clients, their carers, referring agents and others involved the network of care. 
• To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, 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. 

 Teaching, training, and supervision:

• To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a senior clinical psychologist and, where appropriate, other senior professional colleagues, as well as line management from the identified line manager. 
• To continue to gain wider post-qualification experience of clinical / counselling psychology over and above that provided within the principal service area where the post-holder is employed. 
• 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. 
• To provide professional and clinical supervision of assistant/graduate psychology staff and, as appropriate, to contribute to the supervision of individual cases for trainee clinical psychologists. 
• To contribute to the pre- and post-qualification teaching of relevant healthcare staff, as appropriate. 
• To contribute to external and internal training programmes. 

 Management, recruitment, policy and service development:

• To contribute to 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. 
• To advise both service and professional management on those aspects of the service where psychological and/or organisational matters need addressing. 
• To help manage the workloads of assistant psychologists, within the framework of the team/service’s policies and procedures. 
• To be involved, as appropriate, in the shortlisting and interviewing of assistant psychologists/graduate psychology staff. 
• To be involved in service development projects as agreed by the professional lead.