NursingNetUK

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Please refer to the attached job description and person specification for full details of responsibilities

• To provide specialist psychological assessments of children and adolescents referred to CAMHS, based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with young people, their families and others involved in the young person’s care (including professionals from other agencies).
• To individually formulate, plan, implement and evaluate plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a young person’s mental health or other complex psychological problems based on an appropriate conceptual framework adapting/utilising several psychological models and employing methods of proven efficacy, across a range of care settings.
• To be responsible for implementing psychological interventions in own area of speciality for individual children and young people, families/carers, and via groups, within and across teams, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing on different explanatory models including developmental, cognitive, learning theory, biological, 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 and their family and/or carers or group.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, psychological formulation, treatment and discharge of own clients, and to manage and maintain caseload in line with service requirements.
• To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
• To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving these children and their families.
• To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients and/or carers and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care and joint work with other agencies.
• To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, to clients, family/carers, and others as appropriate, information that may be contentious or highly distressing concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care.
• To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management in line with Trust and inter-agency policies and procedures.