Job summary
- Main area
- Pain Management
- Grade
- NHS AfC: Band 7
- Contract
- Permanent: on site working is required
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week (Mon - Friday 9am (occasionally 8.30am) - 5pm)
- Job ref
- 196-LIS9783
- Employer
- Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- INPUT Pain Management Unit, Gassiot House, Ground Floor, St Thomas' Hospital
- Town
- London
- Salary
- £56,276 - £63,176 p.a. Inclusive of HCA
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 19/08/2025 23:59
Employer heading
HCPC Registered Practitioner Psychologist / CBT Therapist
NHS AfC: Band 7
Guy’s and St Thomas’ is among the UK’s busiest and most successful NHS foundation trusts. We provide a full range of hospital and community services for people in south London and as well as specialist care for patients from further afield including cancer, renal, orthopaedic, respiratory and cardiovascular services.
Guy’s is home to the largest dental school in Europe and a £160 million Cancer Centre opened in 2016. As part of our commitment to provide care closer to home, in 2017 we also opened a cancer centre and a kidney treatment centre at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup. St Thomas’ has one of the largest critical care units in the UK and one of the busiest emergency departments in London. It is also home to Evelina London Children’s Hospital.
Evelina London cares for local children in Lambeth and Southwark and provides specialist services across south east England including cardiac, renal and critical care services. We lead a number of specialist service networks aiming to ensure children are treated locally where possible, but have access to specialist expertise when they need it. Our community services include health visiting, school nursing and support for families of children with long-term conditions.
Our adult community services teams deliver care at the heart of the local communities we serve, working in partnership with GPs, local authorities and other healthcare and voluntary sector organisations. Working with our partners in Lambeth and Southwark, we are focusing on new ways of working to improve care for local patients.
In February 2021 the Royal Brompton and Harefield joined Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, bringing together world-leading expertise in the care and research of heart and lung disease. Our merger provides a once in a generation opportunity to build a lasting, world-renowned heart and lung centre, providing the highest quality care for patients and conducting world-leading research.
We have a reputation for clinical excellence and high quality teaching and research. We are part of King’s Health Partners, one of eight accredited UK academic health sciences centres. In partnership with King’s College London we have dedicated clinical research facilities including an MHRA accredited Phase I clinical trials unit.
Patients are at the heart of everything we do and we pride ourselves on ensuring the best possible patient experience as well as safe, high quality care. We are proud to have one of the lowest mortality rates in the NHS. Following a comprehensive Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection in 2019 we maintained our overall rating of ‘good’. Our adult community services achieved a rating of ‘outstanding’.
The commitment of our 23,500 staff is key to our success. We are one of the largest local employers and we aim to develop and support all our staff so they are able to deliver high quality, safe and efficient care. The 2019 NHS staff survey results show that we have one of the most engaged and motivated workforces in the NHS. We know this has a positive impact on the care provided to our patients.
We have one of the most ambitious capital investment programmes anywhere in the NHS.
Job overview
An exciting opportunity for a Band 7 Psychologist or appropriately qualified and experienced CBT Therapist has arisen in our unit, one of the few departments in the country offering high intensity multidisciplinary residential pain management programmes. We are seeking a committed practitioner Clinical, Health or Counselling Psychologist or CBT Therapist with a keen interest and experience in chronic pain management. The successful candidate will join our multidisciplinary team and will be involved in running pain management programmes, offering individual psychological interventions and contributing to multidisciplinary assessments. We offer a wide range of services, including residential pain management programmes, outpatient programmes, virtual programmes, a one-to-one pathway and a self-directed, therapist supported online programme.
Main duties of the job
The post holder will provide a professional psychology service to patients in the specialist field of chronic pain, offering highly specialist psychological assessment, treatment and consultation. This includes helping patients with chronic pain to live a full and healthy life, using evidence-based ACT principles and methods. Skills in both group-based an individual therapy are essential. Psychologists are integral members of the multidisciplinary team, working autonomously within professional guidelines and the overall framework of the team’s policy and procedure. They have responsibility for ensuring the theoretical integrity of the programme and guiding the multidisciplinary team in providing a high-quality service based on current research and knowledge. They offer advice about clients’ psychological care to other professionals as well as non-professional carers.
Our unit has strong research and training links with the Institute of Psychiatry and regularly provides placements for trainee clinical psychologists. The department plays a key role in training health professionals from varied backgrounds and frequently hosts visitors from the UK and overseas. The post holder will be expected to contribute to training and supervision.
You will have a keen interest in psychology applied to physical health, and will ideally have some experience in working with chronic health conditions.
Working for our organisation
If you are looking for a chance to be part of a well-established and reputable clinical and research centre at the cutting edge of clinical health psychology, we would like to hear from you. Our department has implemented a number of exciting and novel service developments (including an online pain management programme and virtual group programmes during the pandemic).
The Pain Management Service is a friendly unit, where psychologists are valued for the contribution they make to the multidisciplinary team; they work closely with pain consultants, clinical nurse specialists, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists.
There is a commitment in the team to research, audit and evaluation work, and you would input into the process of audit and service development. There are seven clinical psychologists and an assistant psychologist based within the multidisciplinary unit.
You will have opportunities to link up with other psychologists working within the Trust and will be encouraged to network with members of the Faculty of Clinical Health Psychology. Regular CPD events are held within the Trust, Kings Health Partners and the service. This is a well-supported position with ready access to individual and peer supervision.
We are privileged to be in a prime location in central London, just opposite the Houses of Parliament with many amenities on site and near-by. There are good public transport links (Waterloo, Westminster and Victoria Stations are all close)
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Main Clinical responsibilities
- To provide specialist psychological assessments of patients referred to the pain management team based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex data from a variety of sources including psychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with patients, family members and others involved in the patients’ care. This mainly includes contributing to multidisciplinary assessments.
- To formulate and implement plans for the formal psychological treatment and/or management of a patient’s physical and psychological health problems, based upon an appropriate conceptual framework of their problems, and employing methods based upon evidence of efficacy, across the full range of care settings.
- To be responsible for implementing a range of psychological interventions for groups and individuals, within and across teams. This will include outpatient, individually tailored treatment for chronic pain and related problems such as depression, anxiety and trauma as well as inpatient group pain management treatment and therapist supported online programmes.
- 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, family or group.
- To exercise professional responsibility for assessment, treatment and discharge.
- To provide specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation to other professionals internal and external to the service contributing directly to patients’ formulation, diagnosis and treatment plan.
- To undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual patients and to provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects of risk assessment and risk management.
- To communicate in a skilled and sensitive manner, information concerning the assessment, formulation and treatment plans of patients under their care and to monitor progress during the course of both uni- and multi-disciplinary care.
- To ensure that all members of the treating team have access to a psychologically based framework for the understanding and care of service users, through the provision of advice, consultation and the dissemination of psychological research and theory.
- To ensure provision of a care package appropriate to the patients’ needs, and where necessary, advise on and facilitate referrals to other services.
- Jointly with other psychologists, to ensure that the programme remains consistent with ACT and the psychological flexibility model on which it is based.
Person specification
Knowledge/Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Doctoral level training in clinical, counselling or health psychology as accredited by the HCPC
Desirable criteria
- Further training in health psychology, pain or long-term condition management
- Training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Previous Experience
Essential criteria
- Experience of working with a wide variety of client groups, across the whole life course and presenting with the full range of clinical severity.
- Maintaining a high degree of professionalism in the face of highly emotive and distressing problems, verbal abuse and the threat of physical abuse.
- Experience of using evidence based psychological interventions for the assessment and treatment of a wide variety of psychological problems, working in both multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary teams
- Experience of providing both group-based and individual interventions
- Experience in the field of health psychology, particularly working with chronic conditions.
Desirable criteria
- Experience of the application of psychology in different cultural contexts.
- Experience of teaching, training other professionals in psychological concepts and/or professional and clinical supervision.
Skills
Essential criteria
- Well developed communication skills both written and verbal, with the ability to communicate complex, highly technical and clinically sensitive information to clients, their families, carers and a wide range of lay and professional persons within and outside the NHS.
- Doctoral level knowledge of research design and methodology, including complex multivariate data analysis as practiced within the field of clinical psychology.
- Skills in providing psychological therapies in both individual and group settings.
- Skilled in psychological assessment, intervention and management, including facilitating external referrals
- Ability to teach and train others using a variety of complex multi-media materials for presentations in public, professional and academic settings.
Desirable criteria
- Skills in using virtual platforms and tools to provide assessment and clinical interventions
- Knowledge of the recent literature and practice of specialised psychological therapies in physical health (e.g. chronic pain) and the use of psychological interventions, including cognitive behavioural techniques, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy techniques (ACT), and mindfulness techniques
Employer certification / accreditation badges
Applicant requirements
You must have appropriate UK professional registration.
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Lucie Knight
- Job title
- Lead Counselling Psychologist
- Email address
- [email protected]
- Telephone number
- 02071883255
- Additional information
Eleanor Carson
e-mail: [email protected]
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