DCP London events update

Our most recent event, ‘Tackling social class and class-based inequalities: Implications of the new BPS Policy Campaign’, provided an opportunity to hear about the background and aims of this year’s policy campaign, which is focused on adding social class as a protected characteristic to the Equality Act. To find out more about the campaign visit the BPS website.

The event also launched new BPS guidance on using community psychology approaches to reduce the impact of inequality through the Community Mental Health Framework. Maryam Haghiran, trainee clinical psychologist, provides a write-up of the event later in the newsletter.

DCP Digital Healthcare Committee

The DCP Digital Healthcare Committee hosted an online webinar on 12 May, entitled ‘Developing your Digital Practice Skills - Current Practice and Beyond’. This launched the free-to-access digital clinical practice e-learning which is available through BPS Learn, and included several presentations on the future roles of psychologists in digital practice.

DCP Pre-Qualification Group

The Pre-Qualification Group has developed new resources to support the application process, which include a comprehensive Q&A document and a new pre-recorded webinar on preparing for interviews.

DCP Minorities Group

You can find the latest newsletter from the Minorities Group online.

DCP annual conference

The annual conference has been rescheduled for 13 and 14 October. This year’s theme is ‘Facing Threat and Uncertainty Together: Maintaining momentum through global, professional and personal challenge’. Registrations are open and confirmed speakers include Dr Lucy Johnstone, Professor Deborah Lee and Professor Victoria Tischler.

Leading London psychologist Roz Shafran talks to Keith Miller.

Roz Shafran is professor of translational psychology in the population, policy and practice department of the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health at University College London. Translational psychology focuses on developing strategies to incorporate research findings in psychology into practice-based settings and policy development.

It is relatively easy to find specific instances of research in psychology that has been translated into successful application and clinical intervention (particularly in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder). However, it is not usually part of our approach as a profession to focus on strategies which will increase the likelihood of psychological findings, principles and processes making concrete changes in healthcare settings – this is where Roz’s career has been focused since completing her undergraduate degree. 

Roz graduated from Oxford in 1991 and since then she has pursued a varied and successful career as an applied psychologist working in clinical, academic, educational and research settings. After pre and post-doctoral work in Canada, she returned to the UK to complete her clinical training. From 1999 to 2007 she received fellowships from the Wellcome Trust to work with Professor Christopher Fairburn on cognitive behavioural theories and treatments of eating disorders. She then moved into a training role and became the Charlie Waller chair of evidence-based psychological treatment in April 2007 and co-director of the Charlie Waller Institute in January 2008. This institute was instrumental in providing trainees to work in the IAPT programmes which were developing widely at the time. She left the Charlie Waller institute in 2012 to take up her current role.

She describes her current overriding career aim as to help improve and increase the availability of psychological therapy to children with chronic illness. She worked closely with a range of colleagues, including Professor Sir Terence Stephenson, on research for children with epilepsy and noted how frequently their mental health needs were given far less prominence in treatment than their physical health needs – this means that a high number of children with long-term physical needs (like epilepsy) are not in receipt of appropriate mental health interventions.

Having worked with Professor Stephenson on epilepsy, she has become a principal investigator in a study on Long Covid in children and young people (CLoCk).

This study has recruited 30,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 17, half of whom tested positive for Covid and half negative. The young people received Covid-19 tests between September 2020 and March 2021 and the participants have been assessed using standardised self-report measures of physical and mental health. After three months, the study showed high rates of mental health difficulties in the young people but showed no differences between the positive or negative testing groups. Further data are expected from the six, 12, and 24-month post-test follow ups in a few months’ time.

Moving away from her current work, I asked Roz about her reflections on some of the positive professional experiences in her career. She emphasised how important professional gatherings – seminars, workshops and training events - had been for her, events which have been almost completely absent (certainly in terms of physically attending them) during the pandemic.

She has a strong commitment to multi-professional training in psychological therapy and has arranged online mental health training for staff from over 20 trusts during the pandemic via Bespoke Menta Health. She feels that clinical psychology can do more to promote itself at the policy level and is working hard to do this herself. Roz singled out the work of Peter Fonagy and David Clark as having a very significant impact on service developments which have made psychological therapy more available for the general population. Roz herself has made a recent contribution in ‘How to cope when your child can’t: Comfort, help and hope for parents’.

Finally, I asked her to reflect on the impact of the pandemic and she observed that it was a case of the same storm being faced by people in different ships, with the effects of the pandemic massively affected by people’s material and social circumstances. There is no average experience of the pandemic and the effects are by no means over.

We hope to invite Roz to run a DCP London workshop in the future, where you can discuss these and other issues with her in person.

With the national expansion in training numbers for clinical psychology, London’s training courses require more placements than ever. This is the third in a series of articles where trainees and their supervisors describe a clinical psychology placement from their different perspectives. 

The aim of the series is to illustrate some novel and specialist placements which clinical psychologists in London may not be aware of and remind those qualified colleagues who don’t regularly supervise what a rewarding and important professional activity this can be.

This interview involves supervisor Jenny Cove and her trainee Rhiannon Storrie talking to Keith Miller about working together in a specialist placement as part of the psycho-oncology service at North Middlesex Hospital in London.

The service consists of a small psychology team and has an establishment of a half-time 8c and a full-time 8a post. The aim of the service is to provide emotional and psychological support for people with cancer as part of a four-stage model of professional psychosocial support provided across the cancer pathway.

· Level 1 support is provided by all staff responsible for the care of people with cancer

· Level 2 is enhanced support provided by professionals with additional training, typically clinical nurse specialists (CNPs)

· Level 3 and 4 is specialist support provided by trained professionals, including CPs and CPs in training

Jenny spoke about the unique nature of the placement experience for trainees.

There is a wide range of work within a health psychology setting and trainees have the opportunity to develop their health psychology expertise working with a supportive multi-disciplinary team, as well as using and developing a wider range of transferable skills.

The focus on clinical work is on supporting patients to adjust to challenging and potentially life-changing health situations. Trainees have the opportunity to deliver direct clinical work (inpatient and outpatient) for people with cancer and their families using a range of different psychological approaches including ACT, Mindfulness, CBT and CFT, with referrals coming mostly from the CNPs. They also provide psychological skills training to members of the MDT, support and supervise CNSs through clinical discussion groups, provide consultation to the MDT and support service development projects.

During the pandemic, trainees have been physically present in the hospital, enabling them to remain directly involved in the service and feel connected. This has been an important contrast to the virtual teaching which has been necessarily part of the pandemic.

Jenny emphasised the benefits to supervisors whereby trainees bring new perspectives on clinical work and service developments, as well as updates about new developments in other areas of clinical psychology. She described offering placements as an enriching experience for the clinical psychologists, along with other members of the team, and is enthusiastic about continuing to offer placements in the future.

Rhiannon was also very positive about her experience of the placement and found that it was unlike any other placement experience she had been involved in.

She particularly enjoyed being part of a supportive multi-disciplinary team working across the hospital with a wide range of staff. Rhiannon discovered that she had several sets of transferrable skills since patients who used the service often required help with issues which pre-existed their cancer diagnosis including anxiety, depression and substance misuse. 

Most importantly, the members of the team were very receptive to her input which included running training sessions on managing self-harm and assessing suicide risk.

Being in the hospital helped her understand the system and made the placement a much more effective and valuable experience than if she was only involved virtually.

She had decided to take up the placement following a presentation by another trainee about a health psychology placement. She wanted to get involved in this work prior to finishing her training and as the placement developed, her confidence grew, leaving her with a richer perspective on this important and expanding role for clinical psychology within healthcare.

With the national expansion in training numbers for clinical psychology, London’s training courses require more placements than ever. This is the second in a series of articles where trainees and their supervisors describe the same clinical psychology placement from their individual perspectives. The aim is to describe some novel and specialist placements that clinical psychologists in London may not be aware of and remind those qualified colleagues who don’t regularly supervise what a rewarding and important professional activity this can be.

This interview involves trainee Michael Rolt and his supervisor Paul Chadwick talking to Keith Miller about working together in a specialist placement in the Centre for Behaviour Change (CBC), based at University College.

The CBC’s mission is to improve global wellbeing, social cohesion and equity, and environmental sustainability through enabling behaviour change. This is achieved by carrying out research to advance the scientific understanding of behaviour and how to change it, developing methods and tools to improve the quality, use and impact of applying scientific understanding, and working with others, nationally and internationally, to translate behavioural science expertise into real-world impact. Paul is Deputy Director of the CBC, and along with the centre’s Director, Professor Susan Michie, has exemplified psychology’s contribution to the Covid-19 pandemic in a series of vital contributions and many media appearances in the last 18 months.

The CBC also offers many interventions aside from Covid-related work. They are involved with using evidence-based interventions to create change in the real world in settings ranging from small businesses to multi-national companies. They offer training and consultancy and carry out basic and applied research, working on issues such as the prevention of violence against women, race-based inequities as well as climate change and health-related behaviour.

Michael Rolt provides a trainee’s view:

Michael has just finished the Royal Holloway course and talked about his specialist placement at the CBC.

He worked across the areas of research, training and consultancy in his placement, which was completely non clinical. The placement allowed him to develop a new set of organisational and leadership skills. He emphasised the breadth of input clinical psychology can offer across a range of settings.

He primarily carried out training and consultancy work on his placement. The main focus of his work was with a Higher Education organisation which wanted to change its research culture as it  was having a negative effect on researcher wellbeing. Michael was involved in the project from its inception to the final stage and, following a series of focus groups and a literature review, developed a systems map of the key players and how the culture was being maintained. Having checked that his map sat squarely with the lived experience of researchers, he developed concrete practical changes which would improve researcher 

wellbeing.

He observed how this process followed the same stages as clinical work: assessment, formulation and intervention.

Seeking out this placement was informed by his previous career. He was a chartered accountant and business analyst for 15 years prior to undertaking clinical training. He reflected on his early placements and concluded that traditional work as a clinical psychologist did not allow him to use his business analytic skills, and this placement allowed him to bring the two phases of his career to date together.

In the future he intends to apply the behavioural change wheel approach developed by Susan Michie and Robert West in his role as a newly-qualified psychologist.

Paul Chadwick talks from a supervisor’s perspective:

Paul emphasised the specialist nature of the placement, particularly stressing the fact that it involved no direct clinical intervention. Michael was the second clinical psychology trainee to carry out a placement at the CBC and Paul was extremely positive about the input trainees made within the organisation. This was partly due to the fact that the trainees brought with them the culture of traditional clinical psychology work, keeping supervisors up to date with developments within the profession. Paul also enjoyed the challenge of helping trainees think about how theories about individual change can be applied to organisational settings. They provided a fresh pair of eyes and could apply the principles of assessment, formulation and intervention which they had learnt at an individual level within an organisational context.

Paul emphasised that trainees needed to have acquired a full set of individually-based clinical competencies before working at CBC. This gave them the freedom to fully embrace new ways of working, and be able to respond to the needs of the organisation, rather than being limited to acquiring competencies. He spoke about Michael’s research culture project, noting that he had worked autonomously and highly effectively, collaborating with others to coproduce a report that contained 20 practical recommendations for organisational change.

There is a clear intention to continue having trainees on placement in this novel setting and clearly the process can involve benefits to both supervisor and trainee.

More information on the theories and methods used by Michael and Paul during the placement can be found on the UCL website.

• DCP London Newsletter - June 2022

• DCP London Newsletter - December 2021

• DCP London Newsletter - October 2021

• DCP London Newsletter - April 2021

• DCP London Newsletter - January 2021

• DCP London Newsletter - October 2020 (DCP members only)

• DCP London Newsletter - June 2020 (DCP members only)

• DCP London Newsletter - November 2019 (DCP members only)

• DCP London Newsletter - May 2019 (DCP members only)

• DCP London Newsletter - January 2019 (DCP members only)