Clinical/Counselling Psychologist or Psychotherapist | North London NHS Foundation Trust

This is an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of specialist mental health care for people with complex mood and/or personality disorder traits. You will be an integral part of two supportive, reflective, and creative teams and actively encouraged to develop your own areas of clinical interest. Your role will be split between the Core Psychology Pathway (0.5wte) and Mood Anxiety and Personality Difficulty (MAP) Pathway (0.5wte) giving you a broad range of clinical experience in order to develop your skills and interests.

The MAP Pathway is an innovative and leading service in the treatment of complex anxiety and depression (with underlying Cluster C PD traits). A supportive, reflective, and creative psychologically-led MDT, the MAP pathway is part of the broader Complex Emotional Needs (CEN) Service, working with the complex PTSD Pathway and the PD Pathway (for Cluster B PD presentations). CEN offers specialist, psychologically informed MDT care to service users presenting with high levels of complexity and need for more intensive input.

The Core Psychology Pathway is a psychological therapies hub that offers outpatient psychological therapies to service users across the three Haringey Core Teams, at Step 4 of the Stepped Care Model (as defined by NICE guidelines). It offers evidence-based individual and group psychological therapies in a range of models (CBT, CAT, Schema Therapy, EMDR, Family Therapy and psychodynamic) as stand-alone interventions.

MAP patients present as withdrawn, isolated, lonely, limited in their functioning and have multiple social and psychological needs. The aim of the team is to help increase people’s emotional, social and practical functioning, so they can engage better with relationships and meaningful activity outside of services. MAP focuses on understanding and working with the relational patterns underlying anxiety and depression.

Core Psychology provision within Haringey has a history of excellence and we have over 20 Psychologists, psychotherapists and Psychological Therapists working within adult mental health services, all based at St Ann’s Hospital. Part of your role will involve delivering Trauma-Informed individual and/or group psychological therapy, conducting psychological assessments, providing consultation to non-psychology colleagues and supervision.

The Core Psychology Pathway is located within the three core teams in Haringey (East, Central, and West) and offers a range of high quality, individual, and group based therapies for people who do not require full MDT care. All psychological pathways in Haringey hold an ethos of the importance of supervision, development and providing nurturing and supportive networks to allow psychological therapists to grow. There is significant opportunity for learning and development, and Haringey has an excellent Psychology CPD training calendar, involving various trainings on a monthly rota.

North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) is committed to improving mental health care across North London to deliver excellent services to our local people. We will provide consistently high-quality care closer to home. With our partners in North London and each borough we will ensure equity of outcome for all. We will offer great places to work, providing staff with supportive environment to deliver outstanding care.

We develop and retain our staff through leadership behaviours and managers programme and many more opportunities. We promote flexible working and support staff with a range of health and wellbeing initiatives. NHS Discounts, generous annual leave and NHS pension scheme.

In order to meet the needs of the Trust you may be required from time to time to work at different locations to your normal place of work. This may mean that you are required to work at any location that falls under Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey or Islington. 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.

Models used within the MAP Pathway range from Schema Therapy, DBT, psychodynamic, Systemic and CBT. Essential to the functioning of the MAP Pathway is a shared responsibility approach which is containing for staff. All risk issues and clinical decisions are held as a team and there are multiple forums each week to discuss such issues with the rest of the team. The team offers a variety of interventions, such as therapeutic groups and individual psychological, and social interventions, all of which you will be involved in. You will hold a small caseload of key clinician clients and provide consultation for other clients in the Pathway.

Within the Core Psychology Pathway, you will have a small caseload of clients for individual therapy, you will run one of the therapeutic groups offered in the service, and conduct high quality, trauma-informed assessments to develop a person-centred treatment plan for service users. In addition, you will have opportunities for non-direct clinical work such as offering supervision, providing consultation, contributing to audits and taking on duties to improve your leadership skills. There is flexibility to develop your own therapeutic interests in the Core Psychology pathway and you will receive high quality, model specific, supervision.