Calling for statements of interest

The Division of Clinical Psychology, London Branch are calling for statement of interests.

You must be signed-in to access the following material

• Access the Notice for details of the positions calling for statements of interest (member only)
• Download further information on the roles
• Submit an statement of interest

The deadline for submitting an statement of interest form is 12 noon on Friday 4 February 2022

To help you complete this form, please download the step by step guide

Elections will be formally ratified at the next Committee meeting for Division of Clinical Psychology, London Branch on Friday 18 March 2022

For any queries regarding submitting an statement of interest, email Member Network Services

Neil Rees has spent his entire career as a qualified clinical psychologist working in London. He will be well-known to many readers of this newsletter as the long-standing clinical director and then joint programme director of the University of East London (UEL) training scheme.

Neil became involved in training because he hugely valued his own training experience on the Oxford course and wanted to enable others to have a similar positive preparation for entry into the profession. He was attracted to the emphasis UEL placed on social context and the environmental conditions of life as contributors to psychological difficulties within the population rather than the individualised approach dominant within mental health services. During his 19 years of involvement with training, he has overseen the qualification of some 500 clinical psychologists. He has always prioritised staying involved in clinical work whilst a trainer and has worked with adults and, latterly, children and young people, including posts at Great Ormond Street Hospital and community paediatric palliative care and young people’s services in East London.

Alongside his work as a trainer and clinician, Neil embraced other forms of professional activity including working as a British Red Cross volunteer with the psychosocial support team which joins the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s rapid deployment team providing emergency psychosocial support to British citizens affected by emergencies overseas. Neil has been deployed to the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Paris terrorist attacks, the Libyan civil war and supporting vulnerable adults in Zimbabwe. Closer to home, he has supported unaccompanied asylum seeking young people being brought out of the Calais jungle refugee camp and supporting people in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. He also became a valued member of the regional committee overseeing the development of psychology in London which he feels managed the rare achievement of bringing North and South London together in a united NHS front.

After his two decades of working in training, 15 years of which involved clinical work in Newham CAMHS, he wanted a new challenge and moved to the post of trust lead psychologist for staff wellbeing at Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) in January 2020. This is a senior role in an extremely large NHS organisation which, following recent mergers, has some 24,000 staff. Readers will have noted that he took up this post within weeks of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The post had been created by an organisation that had, pre-Covid, already recognised the high levels of stress within its large and culturally diverse staff group.

Neil’s main initial task was to develop a strategy to improve staff support and promote psychological wellbeing in a proactive manner working at preventative and organisational levels within GSTT. Neil has developed psychosocial support interventions, training programmes, reflective practice and debriefing initiatives, and culturally sensitive interventions at both the organisational and individual level. He has worked closely with Harriet Conniff, the lead staff wellbeing psychologist for GSTT’s Evelina Children’s Hospital and Women’s Services.

Neil emphasises the support he has received from senior members at GSTT. In order to provide support to staff in the context of the pandemic, he has expanded the team and now has 15 clinical and counselling psychologists (12 wte posts) and an assistant (many qualified staff had completed the UEL course). He is applying for a further 18 months of funding for these staff and to increase the size of the team whilst endeavouring to make these posts permanent. He has also created a post designed to increase access to the health and well-being programme  for members of ethnic minority/global majority groups and has formed close links with the Chaplaincy team at GSTT.

In terms of the next 18 months, Neil has concerns about the effect of the pandemic on an already exhausted group of staff. They are operating in a situation where there exists:

· Reduced levels of staffing

· Increasingly long waiting lists

· Increased severity of presentations

· Large numbers of mental health crises seen in A&E

· Winter pressures

Nevertheless, the novel and forward-thinking approach at GSTT has enabled the creation of a staff wellbeing service which is organisationally, as well as individually, focused and has psychological approaches at its core.

A recently qualified psychologist talks to Keith Miller about joining the DCP.

Dr Lily (Litza) Krause obtained her doctorate in clinical psychology in 2020 from the University of Surrey. She joined the DCP at the same time as applying for her first job as a qualified clinical psychologist. What started as a process of form filling has, 15 months on from qualifying, become very meaningful and professionally enriching.

Lily initially chose psychology as an undergraduate degree because she was interested in working with people and had enjoyed it at A-Level. She completed her undergraduate course but was unsure about her next step career-wise. Over the next few years, she obtained a series of psychology-related jobs in learning disabilities, public health and family interventions. She was inspired by these roles but felt frustrated by not having the expertise to give the specialised help she felt the clients really required, so she decided to apply for the doctorate in clinical psychology and was accepted by Surrey on her second application.

Like many, Lily found that the process of qualifying as a clinical psychologist was a huge and not straightforward task and was challenging in several ways.

She had been a BPS member since 2012 but did not join the pre-qualification groups run by the DCP. She was aware of the competitive nature of the process to get accepted onto clinical psychology training and directly experienced this competitive aspect as unhelpful in the assistant psychologist groups she had joined. This discouraged her from further formal professional involvement at this point in her career.

She had the almost universal experience of finding the process of training exhausting – not just because of the workload and deadlines but because of the change in professional identity that happened during the training process which left her feeling a little uninspired – unlike the enthusiasm she had felt as an undergraduate and assistant psychologist or in other similar posts.

On qualification – which occurred virtually as the pandemic had affected the normal graduation process - she was keen to obtain her first job. She had enjoyed her final placement in neuropsychology and obtained a post as a clinical psychologist in an inpatient neurorehabilitation unit.

Looking back on this experience, Lily is aware that there had been no discussion and little help about the process of qualifying and applying for a first job. Informal contacts were limited by the pandemic and the last few months of her teaching had been virtual.

Keen to obtain her first post, she set about dealing with the bureaucracy this involved and joined the HCPC and – with the application form for her first post asking for BPS membership details – she also joined the DCP. Rather like emigrating and filling in a stack of forms at once.

Once Lily became established in her new job role she felt she needed to find a way of recapturing the excitement she had felt when studying psychology as an undergraduate and working in the field of psychology prior to completing doctorate level training.

Her involvement with the DCP has given her the opportunity to be part of something bigger and experience more than just day-to-day clinical and professional interaction.

Initially, when she tried to join the DCP it took five or six failed attempts to find the right part of the website and the right forms to fill in. Having joined, she saw a copy of the DCP London newsletter with contact details which enabled her to email and then have a discussion with a member of the DCP London committee.

After a discussion about her interests she joined the DCP Communications committee which was looking for new members. She spoke to the Chair Julia Faulconbridge and has become a valued member of the group. She attends monthly virtual meetings and has taken part in a joint project with Tony Lavender trying to map the structure of the BPS and DCP to enhance communication between divisions and ultimately increase transparency to the members and the public.

She feels invigorated, involved with wider projects and enjoys working with people who are at different stages of their career but have a shared goal of disseminating information within and outside the profession of clinical psychology.

Having learned more about the strengths and weaknesses of the DCP, Lily hopes to go on to be able to continue working with the division to make improvements and increase a sense of community within the profession. She also plans to continue working in the NHS to develop her clinical skills and consider wider system changes that could improve patients’ lives.

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 - 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)