Job Role

The postholder will work as a member of the multidisciplinary team in the North Middlesex Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Paediatric Liaison Team (CAPPLT).

The postholder will provide a mixture of general paediatric work, alongside specific input for children with sickle cell disease and their families. They will be responsible for providing specialist clinical psychology input to the sickle cell and thalassemia service. This will include providing psychological assessments, cognitive assessments and therapeutic treatment within a multidisciplinary service, offering advice and consultation on patients’ psychological care to parents, families, groups, paediatric, and other hospital staff, and consultation to other disciplines and professional networks, including staff from outside the hospital.

The postholder will receive clinical psychology supervision from a senior member of the Clinical Psychology discipline and will be responsible and accountable to the North Middlesex Head of Paediatric Liaison Psychological Therapies. The postholder will work autonomously within professional guidelines and within the overall framework of the Paediatric services policies and procedures.

The Post holder will be informed by evidence-based practice and participate in audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the paediatric liaison team.

Responsibilities

• To provide a specialist clinical psychology service to the sickle cell and thalassemia service within the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Paediatric Liaison team in accordance with objectives agreed with the line manager.
• To provide specialist psychological assessments of referred infants and their carers, children and adolescents, parents and carers with sickle cell disease and other physical health conditions to assess the most appropriate treatment for them in co-operation with other members of the multidisciplinary team.
• To provide specialist psychological assessments of patients 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 patients’ family members and others involved in the patient’s care.
• To formulate and implement plans for psychological interventions including treatment and/or management of a patient’s psychological problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of the patient’s problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy.
• To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of patients whose problems are managed by psychologically based standard care plans.