Job overview

Harrow Adult Mental Health is looking for a highly motivated and passionate Psychologist to join our psychological therapies team. This specialist post is offered within the acute pathway, and sits across the Inpatient Psychology Team and Mental Health Emergency Assessment Centre (MHEAC). The Inpatient Psychology Team provides psychology services to two Adult Acute Mental Health Inpatient Wards (Eastlake & Ferneley) based at Mental Health Centre, Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow.

The Acute Psychology Pathway provides integrated and high quality psychologically-informed care to service users with acute mental health presentations; including psychosis, complex emotional needs and PTSD. The successful candidate will play a key role in the urgent assessment of service users presenting to acute services, and the development of creative, multi-disciplinary care plans to support these service users outside of hospital. They will be involved in the provision of psychological intervention that follows service users from acute to community services, under our continuity pathway.

Harrow is committed to the continued development of our staff. In line with this, the post-holder will be funded to complete EMDR training in 2025/26.

Main duties of the job

The post-holder will also be expected to take a leading role in the ongoing development of Harrow's Trauma-Informed Approaches (TIA) model for the adult mental health services. This approach has been established in Harrow acute services over the last six years, recently published (Nikopaschos et al. 2023) and now also influencing National Policy (see NHSE Guidelines for Acute Inpatient Mental Health Care for Adults and Older Adults, 2023).

The Harrow Inpatient Psychology Team and Mental Health Emergency Centre work closely together with Home Treatment Team (HTT) and Community Mental Health Hub as a cohesive system, which provides holistic intervention to adults with mental health difficulties in Harrow.

The post-holder will be expected to work as a senior member of the multi-professional team, including the provision of consultation, co-working, teaching, training, supervision and research as well as developing specific training to enhance the systematic provision of psychological interventions offered to service users by all members of the team within a 'stepped-care' framework.

Specialist supervision is offered in EMDR, DBT, NET, CBT, Open Dialogue, CAT, systemic and psychodynamic models.

Working for our organisation

CNWL provides NHS services throughout a person's life, in physical and mental health and everything in between, at GPs and hospitals to the community and in their own home.

The majority of our services are provided in the community, which means treating people in their homes or from clinics close to home. In this sense we are a very modern part of the NHS, something the new Long Term Plan wants to see more of, with better integration and coordination of care, delivered as close to home as possible

Where community care is not possible we offer a number of facilities to treat people in hospital or residential environments. We also provide healthcare in prisons in London and the surrounding areas.

Partnerships are central to what we do here - with patients and their families, with staff and with other organisations, especially commissioners and providers but also with local authorities, GPs, universities and the voluntary sector. We envisage more in the years to come.

We are committed to providing services that meet the needs of the people who use them, and we actively encourage involvement from local people who can help make a difference.