Job Description

We are seeking an experienced, innovative, and enthusiastic Highly Specialist Clinical or Counselling Psychologist to join our exciting new Universities of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Mental Health Student Service (UCARMHSS) pilot which is set to launch in 2025.

This new service will offer multiple pathways:

psychiatry, psychology, and care coordination, allowing students to access tailored interventions. The goal is to improve access to support for students' mental health, inform about available support, and guide them in managing their mental health.

Key features of the service include:

A focus on student needs rather than diagnosis, with every referral undergoing thorough triage and, where necessary, formulation assessments. Proactive support to help students succeed academically and socially at university. Flexible access to services, with face-to-face, telephone, video, and other online options available to meet individual preferences. Comprehensive care coordination, encompassing assessment, case management, self-management support, and liaison with university services. To provide a qualified, highly specialist psychology service to students from the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University who present with moderate to severe mental health difficulties. To provide highly specialist psychological assessment and therapy at the same time as offering advice and consultation on clients' psychological care to both professional colleagues and staff from other agencies. To work autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of both the Trust's and the service's policies and procedures. To utilise research skills for audit, policy and service development and research within the area served by the team/service

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust is a health and social care organisation dedicated to providing high-quality care with compassion to improve the health and wellbeing of the people we care for, as well as supporting and empowering them to lead a fulfilling life.



Our clinical teams deliver many NHS services, not only via inpatient and primary care settings, but also within the community. These services include children's, adult and older people's mental health, forensic and specialist mental health, learning disabilities, primary care and liaison psychiatry, substance misuse, social care, research and development.



To achieve our goal, we look to recruit high-calibre candidates who share our vision and values. As an equal opportunities employer, we encourage applications from all sectors of the community, particularly from under-represented groups including people with long term conditions and members of our ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ communities.



Please be advised we reserve the right to close adverts earlier than the closing date should we receive sufficient applications.



Regrettably, we cannot offer sponsorship for all our job roles. If you apply for a role that we cannot offer sponsorship for, unfortunately, your application form will be rejected from the process.



For further information on CPFT, please visit our website at www.cpft.nhs.uk



Please refer to the attached job description and person specification for full details of responsibilities



1. To provide highly specialist psychological assessments of students referred to UCARMHSS 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 clients, and others involved in the client's care (including professionals from other agencies).

2. To individually formulate, plan, implement and evaluate plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a client's mental health or other complex psychological problems based on an appropriate conceptual framework adapting/utilising several psychological models and employing methods of proven efficacy, across a range of care settings.

3. To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for individual students, and via groups, within and across teams, adjusting and refining psychological formulations drawing on different explanatory models including developmental, cognitive, learning theory, biological, neuropsychological, and maintaining a number of provisional hypotheses.

4. To evaluate and make decisions about treatment options, taking into account both theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual.

5. To exercise autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, psychological formulation, treatment and discharge of own clients, and to manage and maintain caseload in line with service requirements.

6. To provide highly specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals contributing directly to clients' formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.

7. To contribute directly and indirectly to a psychologically based framework of understanding and care to the benefit of all clients of the service, across all settings and agencies serving these students.

8. To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of (case holder) clients and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care and joint work with other agencies.

9. To communicate in a highly skilled and sensitive manner, to clients and others as appropriate, information that may be contentious or highly distressing concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of clients under their care.

10. To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management in line with Trust and inter-agency policies and procedures.