Practitioner Psychologist / Systemic Family Therapist

Job responsibilities

Attach is a psychology-led service supporting children in care that has recently launched within West Sussex County Council. We offer direct assessment and therapy, support for foster and residential carers and reflective supervision and training for social work colleagues with the aim of improving the lives of young people in care.

The Attach service is made up of experienced mental health practitioners who have worked for most of their careers in the NHS, and have all moved across to social care. We are excited to be part of West Sussex County Council and are learning together about the opportunities available here. Working within a local authority our referrers are our colleagues; this enables closer working relationships and opportunities to influence change at both a systemic and individual level. There are regular training opportunities within the local authority.

The role focuses on improving emotional wellbeing, placement stability, relational health and trauma informed practice across childrens social care services. The post holder will provide psychologically informed assessment, consultation, formulation, therapeutic intervention and workforce support for children and young people who have experienced trauma, adversity and disrupted attachment and who, for the most part are growing up outside their birth families.

We have two roles:

1.) Psychological practitioner Grade12, 0.7FTE: support to Children in Care and their carers/networks

You will be part of a growing team of clinicians, in responding to requests for specialist therapeutic support for children we care for. We are not a mental health service, but instead in an early intervention service providing psychologically informed care to strengthen relationships between children we care for and their key adults, and where needed direct individual, dyadic or systemic therapeutic interventions with children and their parent-people. You will be part of regular triage meetings, where you will share in clinical decision making, as well as clinical team and business meetings.

Unlike more traditional mental health service models, in Attach we provide a range of different interventions to meet the needs of the population we service, for example offering:

- Drop In consultations to social work colleagues, with the aim of providing a thinking space to unpick clinical dilemmas and develop psychological formulations with related care plans

- A series of time-limited consultation spaces to adults caring for children with the aim of both making sense of behaviours that cause concern, and exploring ways to move forward together

- Leading reflective practise groups for social work colleagues

- Collaborating with colleagues in delivering a range of different training offers to the network of adults involved in caring for children

2.) Psychological practitioner Grade12, 0.6FTE: support to Children in Care who are unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people and their carers/networks

In this role, whilst also part of the growing Attach team described above, this post would work closely with a co-worker supporting unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people and their networks e.g. Personal Advisors in the Care Leavers service and social workers in the Child Asylum Team. The current post holder has been a lone clinician developing these pathways of support for the past couple of years. They are working as a mental health practitioner (occupational therapist by profession), and they provide 0.7FTE of support.

The UASC role will hold a caseload of unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people who have been referred by their social worker, due to concerns about their emotional wellbeing e.g. sleep, anxiety, depression, isolation and trauma through their journey to the UK. Together, you would triage these referrals and individually develop and disseminate packages of care to young people. This will include initial assessments, network meetings to share an understanding of well-being need, as well as a variety of evidenced based and trauma-informed interventions which are time-limited. Sometimes this work necessitates working alongside an interpreter.

Examples of additional offers which are currently offered include offering a reflective practice space for social workers in the Child Asylum Team, adapting trauma-narrative work with young people, attending dyadic developmental psychotherapy training level 1 (DDP level 1), and making use of ideas in supporting carers and social workers. Finally, a monthly therapeutic nature-based group is delivered, co-run with the South Downs Trust. Feedback from UASC young people have described appreciating feeling ...