Psychological Therapy Assistant | South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

In Lambeth Secondary Care Psychological Therapies (SCPT) we are reaching across the pathway and into community and primary care settings. Our clinicians provide a range of specialist psychological therapies for mood, anxiety, trauma related and personality difficulties for adults and their families/networks, with long-standing and complex mental health difficulties.

We have an exciting fixed-term contract (12 Months) opportunity for a psychology graduate to work with us in a role that focuses on integrated working with our local community mental health team (CMHT), providing clinical care to clients with complex needs, as well as managing and assessing new referrals to our service. This varied role will enable you to further develop your skills in structured assessment, psychological formulation, group and individual interventions, staff training and evaluation and system development.

We are looking ideally for someone with experience of working in a mental health setting with complex and severe mental illness, who can take a creative and flexible approach to their work and adapt to the busy, and often unpredictable and demanding working environment. You will be closely supervised by a qualified clinician.

We strongly believe in supporting the development of our staff. In terms of career development, this role would place you in a good position to apply for future training posts in the service.

You will work closely with the psychological therapies service where we adopt a holistic multidisciplinary approach to formulate and implement evidence-based treatment programmes. Within this, you will be reviewing referrals and allocating to best available interventions and you will be co-facilitating group interventions.

The post holder for this role will work flexibly both within the pathway, managing referrals and triages, offering low intensity group interventions in tier 1 as well as reaching out to our short term community mental health team, where they will provide integrated care through MDT involvement, consultation and training. You will need to be able to work with teams, and with people whose behaviour can present as significantly challenging at times.

The post is based at 151 Blackfriars road, but there is an expectation that the postholder will travel to other sites as needed.

The local population has needs related to a high level of social deprivation such as unemployment, poor social housing and child poverty. There are also pockets of greater affluence. There are high levels of morbidity, and levels and complexity of mental health problems are above the national average.

Lambeth CCG and Lambeth Council want people of Lambeth to have a fully integrated and coordinated mental health system which focuses on people's strengths and supports their whole health and wellbeing. They have commissioned SLAM NHS as part of the Lambeth Living Well Network (LWN) Alliance to lead, co-ordinate and, in large part, deliver support and services for those experiencing mental health issues in Lambeth.

The South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust is part of King's Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre (AHSC) and committed to innovation, effective interventions and improved service user outcomes. It provides mental health services to the people of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham and Croydon, and some more specialist services to people from across the UK.

To provide a psychology service, as part of the Secondary Care Psychological Therapies pathway, to users of secondary care community mental health services in Lambeth, and, where appropriate, their families and caregivers. This includes referral processing and screening, assessment, treatment planning and implementation, and monitoring of outcomes, according to relevant guidance and the evidence base. This will be done under the close clinical and professional training and supervision of a psychological therapist.

To assist in clinically related administration, conduct of audits, collection of statistics, development of audit and/or research projects, teaching and project work under the close clinical and professional training and supervision of a practitioner psychologist. In particular to support the development and evaluation of a system for patient pathway tracking with the aim to increase quality of recording of communications, monitoring of clinical note keeping and ease of tracking steps of care.

To work as at appropriate levels of independence, following clinical guidelines and the policies and procedures of the service, supported by the clinical/professional supervisor or manager as required. Provide a range of clinical perspectives, including a CBT or DBT based psychological therapy.

To work as part of a Community Mental Health Team, attending some team meetings and functioning as a liaison point for the Lambeth Secondary Care Psychological Therapies Pathway. The CMHT is the Short Term Support service, a primary care facing CMHT, and Focused Support Team. Service users have a range of problems including psycho social needs, complex affective and anxiety disorders, personality traits and disorders, and complex trauma.

To work flexibly across a range of community, primary and secondary care settings. To contribute to enabling other staff, service users and carers from diverse backgrounds to flourish by working to create a psychologically safe environment.

To work as an autonomous professional within BPS and HCPC guidelines and codes of conduct, and guided by the policies and procedures of the service, taking responsibility for own work including treatment and discharge decisions with support of clinical supervisor.