Clinical Lead - Children's Wellbeing Service in Exeter

We want to improve outcomes for children and young people in Devon, especially for those who have experienced trauma and harm. The Clinical Lead provides clinical leadership and support to the Wellbeing Service Operational Lead in ensuring the right children get the right kind of support at the right time, within Devon's Wellbeing Service. The approach is rooted in our restorative and relational practice framework and is aligned with the strategic objectives of the Growing Futures and Families First programmes. The aim is to transform and improve the experiences of children in care, while enabling more children to live safely within their families and communities whenever possible.

The Clinical Lead is responsible for the delivery and quality of clinical practice across Devon, providing clinical and managerial leadership, building relationships and overseeing therapeutic practice quality. The post holder will provide clinical and transformational leadership to a multi-disciplinary therapeutic service that helps children recover from trauma and harmful experiences. The service provides wrap around support for children on the edge of care, returning home, in care, or leaving our care. It consists of skilled relational practitioners and clinicians who provide support, assessments and therapeutic interventions to children and their networks. The service offers a graduated and timely response to children with emerging and complex needs, to improve their emotional and mental health, family relationships, and the quality of care they receive.

You will support the Wellbeing Service Operational Lead to create a culture of high standards and expectations for children, achieve measurable outcomes and demonstrate improvements and cost effectiveness across the following performance indicators:

• Improved stability for children in care.
• Prevent entry to care, and increase the number of children returning home quickly after entry to care.
• Increase the number of children returning to live in their family network where it's safe and the right place for them to be.
• Increase the number of children and young people who access timely interventions to promote recovery from trauma.
• Increase the number of children who receive timely therapeutic life story work.
• Increase the confidence of foster carers, and children's home support staff, to support and care for children and young people who face complex challenges and improve carer retention rates.
• Increase the number of young people who leave care with family connections and lifelong links.
• Improve feedback from children, young people and our Stand Up Speak up council about their experiences of care and support.

You will also provide expert clinical guidance to the service and the wider organisation to support appropriate prioritisation of need and ensure that therapeutic provisions are appropriate, meet needs, and make a measurable difference to outcomes for children, young people, their families and carers.

Main duties and responsibilities:

• Support the Wellbeing Service Operational Lead by playing a lead role in service design and development, placing restorative and relational practice at the core of decision making.
• Provide high quality line management and supervision to clinical staff, including professional development and performance management.
• Lead a culture of trauma and psychologically informed practice, which develops capacity within the directorate to support children therapeutically.
• Work with children, young people and families to ensure their involvement in service design and delivery, treating them as partners in finding solutions.
• Develop the use of formulation as a shared approach and language to create consistency for children in the help they receive over time.
• Lead and model a culture where creative, person centred and holistic approaches to therapeutic support flourish.
• Provide clinical advice to the Growing Futures programme that supports the development of high-quality therapeutic schools and care provision for children.
• Support practitioners to provide advice and support for young people who are in distress, have unstable social circumstances, or where there are safeguarding concerns.
• Work alongside front-line teams and partners to effectively hold risk, in a context of safe uncertainty.
• Ensure that clinical interventions are timely and purposeful, planning is individual to the needs of each child or young person and that the voice of children and young people is accurately represented and considered.
• Be vigilant to the need to work in partnership with parents wherever possible and support their ownership of their family's recovery.
• Provide psychotherapeutic therapies, developing specialist formulations and assessments of young people and their family, formulating plans for their treatment and implementing specialist interventions for individuals, carers, families and groups, based on evidence-based approaches.
• Improve access for children and care experienced young people to existing mental health provisions by developing close working relationships with key partners, especially Child and Family Health Devon, Devon Partnership Trust, and the voluntary and community sector.
• Take a proactive approach to problem resolution in a culture of continuous shared learning.
• Develop systematic methods for the early identification of post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, and speech and language difficulties, using existing tools, valuing care profiles, and by introducing new evidence-based methods.
• Lead clinical prioritisation and ensure children and carers in scope are offered early intervention to support their long-term mental health and wellbeing.
• Plan and organise the work of the clinical services within the Wellbeing Service to best meet the organisation's strategy and priorities.
• Develop a whole service culture that understands the impact of neurodiversity and how to integrate this within assessment and interventions.
• Communicate in an effective, highly skilled and sensitive manner with young people and their families, who may have specific difficulties in understanding and/or communicating and who may be hostile, antagonistic or highly emotional.
• Actively develop good working relationships with senior professional staff and managers across Children's Services to promote the service and ensure the service aligns with the needs of front-line teams.
• Take responsibility for ensuring that clinical practitioners are accessing up-to-date research knowledge of clinical practice as it relates to practice within the service area.
• Undertake the role flexibly across different parts of the service as directed by the Wellbeing Service Operational Lead and deputise for the Wellbeing Service Operational Lead as requested.
• Provide advice and guidance to Managers across the service when teams or individuals across the service have experienced significant vicarious trauma.
• Have oversight of clinical supervision arrangements, including support to in-house residential provision.
• Contribute to the quality assurance framework for the service and help evaluate and monitor the service delivered.
• Use the findings from the quality assurance framework to drive continuous practice improvement.
• Contribute to service improvement across the directorate including the analysis of data.

This document outlines the duties for the time being to indicate the level of responsibility. It is not a comprehensive or exclusive list, and the duties may be varied from time to time which do not change the general character to the job or the level of responsibility entailed.