Job summary
This role is an empowering opportunity to provide system-level psychologically informed interventions within Islington council's Family Help and Safeguarding services, supporting client-facing staff in these services to respond to mental health issues for parents and adults in families.

Parental and adult mental health issues within families is one of the top reasons for families to be referred to Family Help and Safeguarding services in the borough. Adults in these families can often be multiply excluded from services due to the complexity of their presentations. Providing psychologically informed support and interventions with the council's workforce enhances their knowledge, understanding and skill in working with adults in families who experience mental health issues, providing their service users with an experience of being understood and their needs being identified and responded to appropriately.

The Psychologically Informed Consultation and Training (PICT) service provide an intervention of consultation, training and joint working that supports wider systems outside of North London Foundation Trust (NLFT) to work more effectively with people presenting with complex emotional needs and mental health presentations (not necessarily diagnosed).

The focus of this role will be to provide PICT services to professionals based withinIslington Council's Family Help and Safeguarding Services.

Main duties of the job
The PICT team brings mental health expertise to frontline services with the aim of promoting greater knowledge, understanding, curiosity and skill, enhancing the working relationship between frontline staff and their service users, supporting integration of healthcare and local authority organisations.

Interventions used include:

• Individual and group consultation with staff - to facilitate consultation sessions and support the identification and understanding of mental health needs of adults in the family.
• Training to staff to help increase understanding and confidence in working with clients with complex needs.
• Effective liaison and joint working between Council Services and Adult Mental Health Services.
• Providing group reflective practice.
• To carry out joint direct work with allocated council staff and their service users where indicated, for a small number of clients.
• Work closely and collaboratively with our partners in CAMHS to ensure a whole family approach.
• Co-locate with council teams as a member of the NLFT PICT Team.Support for staff in PICT roles includes regular supervision, monthly facilitated team reflective practice, peer-consultation, monthly sessions with an organisational consultant, seminar and peer learning sessions.

About us
North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) is committed to improving mental health care across North London to deliver excellent services to our local people.

Our Five-Year Strategy:

• We will provide consistently high-quality care closer to home.
• With our partners in North London and each borough we will ensure equity of outcome for all
• We will offer great places to work, providing staff with supportive environment to deliver outstanding care

Why NLFT?

• We develop and retain our staff through leadership behaviours and managers programme and many more opportunities.
• We promote flexible working and support staff with a range of health and wellbeing initiatives.
• NHS Discounts, generous annual leave and NHS pension scheme
• Excellent internal staff network

In order to meet the needs of the Trust you may be required from time to time to work at different locations to your normal place of work. This may mean that you are required to work at any location that fall under Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey or Islington. The Trust reserves the right to require staff to work at such other places or locations as it considers reasonable and necessary on a temporary or permanent basis.

Person Specification
Qualifications
Essential

• Post-graduate doctoral level training in clinical psychology (or its equivalent for those trained prior to 2000) or Counselling psychology as accredited by the Health Professions Council, the British Psychological Society, or British Psychological Society Statement of Equivalence.
• Current registration with the Health Care Professionals Council as a practitioner psychologist.

Desirable

• Completion of further post-qualification specialist training in an area relevant to the post.

Skills
Essential

• Skills in the use of a range of methods of psychological assessment (including psychometric tests), intervention and management for the full range of problems of severity and complexity presented in adult mental health.
• Ability to communicate effectively, orally and in writing, with service users, their families, carers, and other professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Skills in providing consultation to other professional and non-professional groups.
• Ability to form good working relationships with others in a multidisciplinary setting
• Ability to work flexibly and across organisational boundaries, whilst maintaining your professional identity as an NHS professional.
• Ability to teach and train others, using a variety of multi-media materials suitable for presentations within public, professional and academic settings
• Ability to identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance as appropriate, to support and maintain clinical practice.
• Interest and ability to contribute to service development

Desirable

• Post qualification training in at least one or more models of relevant psychological therapy (MBT, CBT/DBT, psychodynamic, systemic therapies, AMBIT).

Experience
Essential

• Experience of working with a wide variety of service users, across the whole life course and presenting problems that reflect the full range of clinical severity.
• Experience of teaching, training, and offering effective consultation and supervision services.
• Experience of working with, and addressing issues of, diversity.
• Experience of the application of consultation and therapy in different cultural contexts.
• Doctoral level knowledge of research methodology, research design and data analysis as practised within the clinical fields of psychology.
• Experience of post qualification highly specialist psychological assessment and treatment of clients with a range of psychological needs of a complex nature in relevant speciality and/or client group e.g. complex trauma/psychosis/personality disorder/addiction/homelessness

Desirable

• Experience of working with people experiencing multiple exclusion
• Experience of working in partnership with other agencies to deliver services.
• Experience of facilitating reflective practice groups.

Qualities
Essential

• Approaching work with curiosity: Encouraging yourself and others to be open-minded, interested, to explore and discover new ideas and ways of responding.
• Demonstrate compassion: Listening with fascination, developing mutual understanding, being empathic and caring, and practically supporting each other.
• Act with thoughtful leadership: Demonstrating thoughtful awareness of our collaborative consultancy stance and our position of autonomy and leadership within the organisations and services we support, to influence positive change and development within wider levels of system context.
• Embody empowerment: Attending to, valuing and promoting diversity and inclusion. Appreciating multiple perspective and orientations, attending to social graces and wider contexts within our conversations together and with staff.
• Commitment to collaboration: working collaboratively across multiple teams and agencies to build positive and effective working relationships to promote the benefits of connection. Being accountable in our service delivery and development, using feedback from the teams we support and reflecting on our work together as a team.
• Ability to maintain a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems.
• Ability to reflect on your own practice to inform your work or interventions.
• Ability to work creatively and flexibly

Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Certificate of Sponsorship
Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (opens in a new tab).
From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (opens in a new tab).

UK Registration
Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).