Job Description

About the Role

To provide one day of qualified psychological assessment and therapy to patients of the Alexander Pringle HIV service. This will include psychological assessments and intervention for patients presenting with mental health difficulties related to, or impacting, their physical health diagnosis and care

Responsibilities

• To provide advice and consultation on clients’ psychological care to non-psychologist colleagues and working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policies and procedures.
• The post holder may offer clinical supervision to trainee clinical / counselling psychologists.
• The role includes provision of reflective supervision to non psychology team members and provision of teaching sessions to the team under the supervision of the Consultant Clinical Psychologist.
• The post holder will be based at the North Middlesex Hospital, Alexander Pringle HIV unit for one day per week. Ideally this will be a Thursday or Friday, two half days would be considered. This is an on-site post.
• To receive regular clinical professional supervision from a relevant senior clinical/counselling psychologist.
• To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individuals within the HIV Service, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing upon different explanatory models and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.
• To make highly skilled evaluations and decisions about psychological treatment options considering both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual.
• To undertake risk assessment and risk management for relevant individual patients and to provide both general and specialist advice for psychologists and other professionals on psychological aspects of risk assessment and management.
• To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment formulation and treatment plans of Haematology and HIV patients under their care and to monitor and evaluate progress within both uni-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary care.
• To provide highly developed specialist psychological assessments of patients referred to the HIV Psychology Service, based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological 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 exercise full responsibility and autonomy for the psychological treatment of and discharge of patients referred to the HIV Psychology service whose problems are managed as a psychologically based standard care plan, ensuring appropriate assessment, formulation and interventions, communicating with the referral agent and others involved with the care on a regular basis.