Specialist Counsellor

Are you passionate about providing evidenced based psychological therapy to people struggling with a range of psychological difficulties including anxiety and depression? Do you want to develop personally and professionally, through regular high-quality individual supervision, and a range of team activities and ongoing CPD opportunities including specialist therapy trainings as available (e.g. IPT, DIT, EMDR, training in CBT for Long Term Conditions)?

This is a role within the Haringey’s well established Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Programme (IAPT).

We are committed in developing our staff and developing specialist areas of clinical expertise through supervision, training and research opportunities, service development projects and reflective spaces.We are looking for a diverse workforce so we particularly welcome staff members who are able to speak and work in languages that reflect the diverse communities in our borough.

We are also mindful that working in a fast-paced service with people experiencing psychological distress can be challenging and we proactively support all our staff. We encourage flexible working and staff are encouraged to negotiate a working pattern that allows for a good work life balance.

All staff are required to work part of the week in a Haringey location with part of the week being worked from home.

Full and part time roles available.

Whittington Health Community Services has been ratedOUTSTANDINGby the CQC.

We are looking for motivated, enthusiastic, and skilled Counsellors who are qualified in an IAPT approved modality to support the provision of high quality evidenced based counselling for the people of Haringey. Band 7 Counsellors should have a core training in Counselling and have specialist training in Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy or Interpersonal Therapy or Counselling for Depression to provide specialist counselling for clients presenting with depression. You will have a specialist case load of clients presenting with depression. Training and experience of providing supervision is also required as Band 7 Counsellors will undertake a range of activities alongside providing high quality one-to-one specialist counselling interventions. You may also be providing professional/clinical supervision to, act as a professional lead for trainee counsellors and potentially undertake research for the counselling team.

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.

• Accept referrals via agreed protocols within the service
• Assess clients for suitability for Counselling using one of the IAPT approved counselling models. Where the problems appear to be too complex or severe to be appropriate for the IAPT service, to refer to manager/supervisor for advice on how to manage the case
• Contribute to diagnostic decisions and advise on the suitability of new referrals, adhering to the department’s referral protocols, and refer unsuitable clients on to the relevant service or back to the referral agent as necessary.
• Formulate, implement and evaluate therapy programmes for clients.
• Educate and involve family members and others in treatment as necessary, conveying CBT formulations with sensitivity in easily understood language.
• Adhere to an agreed activity contract relating to the number of client contacts offered and clinical sessions carried out per week in order to minimise waiting times and ensure treatment delivery remains accessible and convenient.
• Attend multi-disciplinary meetings relating to referrals or clients in treatment, where appropriate.