Clinical Psychologist

We have a permanent Band 7 post for a dynamic and creative clinical psychologist working in a post 3 days a week in Bexley Community Learning Disabilities Team (CLDT) and 2 days a week in the Bromley Community Learning Disabilities Team.

Oxleas is a successful and well-respected Foundation Trust. It has a large, well-established psychological therapies department with extensive experience in providing cognitive, behavioural, and systemic interventions. We have a thriving learning disability psychology speciality with 17 clinical staff working in three community learning disability teams across three boroughs.

Dr Sandra Baum is head of the service and provides monthly group systemic supervision to all psychologists in the service. Individual supervision will be provided by experienced colleagues and encouragement given to join well-established peer supervision groups.

The psychology speciality is a creative and innovative one, encouraging research and service evaluation, with a strong focus on measuring outcomes.

The psychology speciality and Oxleas NHS Trust value highly the involvement and expertise of service users – from being part of interviews for all posts, through to projects to enable their voices to be heard and to influence services. We thus routinely involve service users in our interview process.

The post is available from July but we welcome applications from trainee clinical psychologists qualifying in September.

You would be working in a variety of community settings, with individuals, groups, families, and staff teams, providing assessment, support and intervention and applying a range of therapeutic approaches.

You would be working with other clinical psychologists and psychological therapists, alongside other colleagues in the multi-disciplinary team, sharing psychological knowledge and ideas and fostering psychological mindedness.

You would also be supervising clinical psychology trainees, assistant practitioners, and other psychological therapists. Individual supervision will be provided by experienced colleagues and encouragement given to develop both clinically and professionally.

The post will have a base in ALD at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Frognal Ave, Sidcup, but will require work in various locations across Bexley, and some visits to other boroughs within Oxleas. You will need to be able to travel within the three Oxleas Boroughs (Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley) in a timely manner by car and/or public transport where necessary.

Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.

We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.

Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families. This is strengthened by our new values:

• We’re Kind
• We’re Fair
• We Listen
• We Care
• 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 and other relevant issues, 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 standard care plans.