Highly Specialist Clinical or Counselling Psychologist | East London NHS Foundation Trust

This is an exciting opportunity for a qualified Clinical or Counselling Psychologist eager to take on the challenges of working in a diverse borough with complex cases. The position is divided between two Neighbourhood Mental Health Teams in Tower Hamlets—Isle of Dogs (1.75 days) and Bow & Poplar (1.5 days).

Ideal candidates will have a genuine interest in supporting individuals facing severe and enduring mental health issues, often accompanied by high comorbidity, and will work with clients from various religious, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. The selected individual will collaborate with fellow Psychologists, including a Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist who will offer supervision.

As part of a vibrant multi-disciplinary team based in our community office in Isle of Dogs, the post holder will also provide input to the inpatient wards at Tower Hamlets Centre for Mental Health at Mile End Hospital. Working alongside the team’s 8a Psychologist, the successful candidate will deliver assessments and evidence-based, yet flexible, therapeutic interventions to service users.

In partnership with more experienced colleagues, the appointee will contribute to staff training and offer psychological guidance—both informal and formal—to other staff members, support families, and coordinate with primary and secondary care providers.

We are looking for an individual who appreciates and thrives in a multi-disciplinary team environment, values co-production, and has experience with indirect psychological interventions. The ideal candidate should be adept at collaborating across various agencies. We are open to innovative ideas and a willingness to experiment, all part of our commitment to continuous improvement and the growth of our staff.

Your service area is integrated into the broader psychology and psychological therapy framework in Tower Hamlets. You will be joining a community of psychologists and psychological therapists who work across a diverse range of settings, including inpatient care, Community Mental Health Teams (CMHT), Early Intervention (EI), perinatal services, art therapies, personality disorder services, support for homelessness, services for individuals with learning difficulties, older adult care, PTSD, psychiatric liaison, community health, and community access services.

The department is dedicated to developing and delivering services through co-production with individuals who have lived experience, maintaining a strong partnership with the Local Recovery College. We hold regular meetings and provide extensive support for professional development in various forms.

Our mission is to make a positive difference to people's lives by improving the quality of life for all we serve. Our values are: We Care, We Respect, We are Inclusive – so we are looking for people who live and breathe these qualities when supporting service users and carers, and in their relationships with colleagues in the Trust and our partner organisations.

Role includes the following responsibilities:

• Provide specialist psychological assessments of service users of the locality service, when care is managed under the CPA (community and in patients). This is to be based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex psychological data from a variety of quantitative and qualitative sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and assessments with service users and others involved in their care.
• Be responsible for the formulation and implementation of a broad range of specialist psychological treatment and/or management of service users’ mental health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of those problems derived from a broad theoretical knowledge of psychology, and employing methods based upon evidence of proven efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
• Be responsible for implementing a range of specialist psychological interventions for individual service users, carers and groups, employed singly and in combination, adjusting and refining psychological formulations as practice and experience demand, and drawing upon different explanatory models to maintain a number of provisional hypotheses.
• Evaluate and make decisions about treatment options taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical, development and cultural processes and systems which have shaped the individual, family or group.
• Be responsible for providing and receiving highly complex, sensitive, distressing and emotional information in relation to mental and physical health issues, where there are often difficulties in terms of acceptance or understanding.
• Communicate across language and cultural barriers, including working for sustained periods of time by communicating with service users, carers or groups through professional interpreters or advocates.
• Spend sustained amounts of time with individuals who may be aggressive and hostile to themselves or others, who may have poor communication and/or self-care skills and special physical and/or mental health needs.
• Be responsible for recording, monitoring and reporting on clinical work and communicating, in a skilled and sensitive manner, complex clinical information (including assessment, formulation, treatment plans and progress) to a variety of recipients (e.g. service users, carers, other professionals, formal panels, statutory and voluntary organisations) orally, in writing and electronically.
• Undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual service users as appropriate.