Consultant Clinical Psychologist - Intensive Autism Support

at  Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust

We are seeking to recruit an 8c Consultant Practitioner Psychologist (0.6wte) to a new role within a small resource offering intensive support to those presenting in our urgent and emergency care pathways with a diagnosis of autism. The consultant will be based in Central Norfolk CRHT alongside a Learning Disability and Autism specialist nurse and an assistant psychologist. The intensive support resource will work with those service users with comorbid autism and mental health difficulties in a formulation-led and recovery-oriented way for up to a year. We are expecting that many of the service users will be in the 18-25 age group on the basis of our local service utilisation data.
The post will involve direct work with service users and their carers and families, and also supervision of the other roles in this small team. The postholder will work with the other providers in the system to create a formulation-led care package to support the service user on discharge from this intensive support offer. The postholder will support the wider CRHT in their work with people with autism on a consultation basis. The post will be supported by an experienced 8c Consultant Psychologist who works across inpatient and CRHT services.
Here at NSFT we pride ourselves on being a welcoming, talented, friendly and supportive team who like nothing better than sharing experiences and learning from each other. In addition to ongoing training and development opportunities, we are committed to providing an environment in which you can thrive.
Why work for us? We have challenges as a Trust, but we have ambitious aspirations, are pushing ahead with exciting transformation work and we need dedicated individuals to support us on our journey. We have strong, established professional networks coupled with an exceptional leadership team who will ensure you are truly cared for and cared about.
Why Norfolk and Suffolk? The people here are warm and welcoming, you’ll never be far from the beautiful coastline or Broads National Park. We’re an hour and a half away from London and have an international airport in Norwich too. Our villages, towns and cities are packed full of history, independent cafes, shops and theatres. We have excellent shopping, eating out, top ranking schooling and affordable house prices too.
There will be the opportunity to shape the pathway and the model in order to better support people with autism. For the first twelve months, the team will have a capped caseload as a pilot study. The postholder will be expected to return data to our commissioners on activities and patient outcomes, as well as service utilisation data. The model will be reviewed at the 12 month point and adapted according to early learning from the first pilot cohort.
There will be opportunities to write and present reports at senior-level meetings and contribute to improving services for people with autism via a Norfolk and Waveney Neurodevelopmental group. There will also be opportunities to support wider services via the provision of training.
We would support the successful candidate to train in DBT and contribute to making our DBT programme more effective and accessible for people with autism.
To ensure equity of access across Norfolk and Waveney, the post, although based in Norwich, needs to have adequate geographical reach across the whole ICB footprint. Joint working with our key system partners for LD, Autism and Mental Health will be key to this role.
The postholder will be an experienced practitioner psychologist with at least six years post-qualification experience. They would be expected to have highly specialist skills in diagnosing autism and in providing therapeutic interventions that are autism friendly. They will also bring highly specialist knowledge about autism to the service and system. Experience of working in more than one clinical setting, and of working across the provider system would be highly advantageous. Specialist supervision will be provided to support this new role

Please refer the Job description for details