Job overview

The Oxleas Adult Autism Service is recruiting a Principal Psychologist (Assessment Pathway Lead) for our Adult Autism Diagnostic Team. This Band 8b role offers the opportunity to lead a multidisciplinary team delivering high-quality, person-centred autism assessments for adult without a learning disability.

You’ll oversee clinical referral and diagnostic pathways, support team development, and drive service improvements aligned with Trust objectives and under the leadership of the service clinical lead. 

The successful candidate will be a qualified Clinical Psychologist or equivalent, with substantial leadership and experience in autism diagnostics of adults without a learning disability and complex mental health comorbidities.  You will bring a strong understanding of neurodevelopmental conditions and their interplay with other psychiatric conditions, a commitment to equity and accessibility, and the ability to lead service innovation in a dynamic environment.

Based at Queen Mary’s Hospital, the role is full time and a maternity cover for a period of 18 months and offers the chance to shape neurodiversity services across the Trust. 

Main duties of the job

Key responsibilities include:

1. To provide highly specialist diagnostic and psychological assessments of clients referred to the service based upon the appropriate use, interpretation and integration of complex psychological data from a variety of sources including psychological and neuropsychological tests, self-report measures, rating scales, direct and indirect structured observations and semi-structured interviews with clients, family members and others involved in the client’s care.
2. To provide clinical leadership among colleagues working in the diagnostic pathway 
3. To contribute to development of the Autism diagnostic assessment pathway by increasing clinical effectiveness of pathway including pre-assessment and post-referral clinical screening for clients referred to the service and training for mental health hubs.
4. To provide the day to day clinical management of Autism referral and diagnostic pathway, including liaison with other internal and external services for referrals to the Autism service, day to day management support to internal referral panel, monitor waiting lists and progress of complex referrals with clinician within the team.

Working for our organisation

Oxleas offers a wide range of NHS healthcare services to people in community and secure environment settings. Our services include community health care such as district nursing and speech and language therapy, care for people with learning disabilities and mental health care such as psychiatry, nursing and therapies. Our multidisciplinary teams look after people of all ages and we work in close partnership with other parts of the NHS, local councils and the voluntary sector and through our new provider collaboratives. Our 4,300 members of staff work in many different settings including hospitals, clinics, prisons, secure hospitals, children’s centres, schools and people’s homes.

We have over 125 sites in a variety of locations in the South of England. In London we operate within the Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley Greenwich and into Kent. We manage hospital sites including Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup and Memorial Hospital, Woolwich, as well as the Bracton Centre, our medium secure unit for people with mental health needs. We are the largest NHS provider of prison health services providing healthcare to prisons within Devon, Dorset, Bristol, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, Kent and South London. We are proud of the care we provide and our people.

Our purpose is to improve lives by providing the best possible care to our patients and their families.  This is strengthened by our new values:

• We’re Kind
• We’re Fair
• We Listen
• We Care