Highly Specialist Clinical Psychologist

Main area Clinical Psychologist Grade Band 8a Contract Permanent Hours Full time – 37.5 hours per week (9am -5pm) Job ref 310-MASMH-7588206

Site S3 Outpatients Town Cambridge Salary £57,528 – £64,750 per annum pro rata Salary period Yearly Closing 06/07/2026 23:59

Job overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen to recruit a Band 8a Psychologist within the Cambridge Adult Eating Disorders Team based at Addenbrookes Hospital, working across the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough area. The post holder will be involved in the new service development pathway, helping to lead the provision of NICE‑recommended treatments including Mantra, CAT, CFT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and other therapies relevant to the treatment of eating disorders. Please note for this role you will be required to travel independently around the county meeting strict time deadlines.

Main duties of the job

The Community Adult Eating Disorder Service is a specialist team caring for individuals with an eating disorder who have been triaged and are considered to need an intensive and supportive approach to treatment. The Service is currently undergoing a transformation to develop new pathways, including early intervention, intensive/outreach treatment, supportive and management pathways for severe and enduring cases, and pathways to monitor and manage high‑risk patients. The Service aims to become a pioneer in eating‑disorder care, offering opportunities to be involved in transformation and leadership. The team is an MDT comprising specialist therapists, psychologists, medical staff and nurses. The post holder will provide support and supervision to junior staff, conduct highly specialist clinical assessments and interventions, and contribute a psychological perspective to multidisciplinary reviews and discussions. Regular individual and group supervision will be available.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• Provide highly specialist assessments of clients referred to the Team with eating disorders, engaging families, and offering family‑based interventions in conjunction with the multidisciplinary team.
• Develop psychological formulations of presenting problems that integrate information from assessments within a coherent framework drawing upon psychological theory and evidence, and incorporating interpersonal, societal, cultural and biological factors. Provide interventions and recommendations based on specialist NICE‑informed psychological understanding, and offer support and supervision to team colleagues (e.g. Mantra, CBT, CAT, MET, FBT).
• In conjunction with senior clinicians and managers, develop procedures and processes for the application of specialist NICE‑informed psychological interventions, also considering group work, within the eating‑disorder service, drawing on national, divisional and trust‑wide standards of evidence‑based psychological therapy and best clinical care.
• Provide appropriate care for clients not engaged in treatment, including psycho‑education, liaising with other professionals, engaging in treatment using structured approaches such as motivational interviewing, risk assessment, health promotion and crisis intervention.
• Evaluate and make decisions about treatment options, taking into account theoretical and therapeutic models and highly complex factors concerning historical and developmental processes that have shaped the individual, family, carers or group.
• Exercise autonomous professional responsibility for assessment, psychological formulation, treatment and discharge of clients and manage a caseload in line with service guidelines.
• Provide advice, psychoeducation, information and psychological interventions to relatives and carers as appropriate.
• Liaise closely with eating‑disorder inpatient units, attend review meetings for own clients where possible, and participate in discharge planning and psychological follow‑up.
• Provide highly specialist advice, consultation and training to staff working with the client group across a range of agencies and settings as appropriate, including GPs, acute hospital staff, school nurses and universities.
• Undertake risk assessment and risk management for individual clients and provide advice to other professions on psychological aspects or risk assessment in line with Trust and inter‑agency policies and procedures.

Person specification

Education / Qualifications

• HPC registered Clinical Psychologist or Counselling Psychologist.
• Other recognised mental health professional qualification (e.g. CBT, CAT, MANTRA).
• Evidence of post‑qualification development.
• Post‑qualification training/development in a psychological therapy (e.g. CAT/CBT/IP).

Experience

• Experience of specialist psychological assessment, formulation and treatment of service users across a range of care settings, including outpatient, community and primary care settings.
• Knowledge and experience of working with clients with eating disorders.
• Experience of working with a wide variety of service user groups across the whole life course, reflecting the full range of clinical severity, and 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 exercising full clinical responsibility for service users’ psychological care and treatment, both as a professionally qualified care co‑ordinator and within the context of a multidisciplinary care plan.
• Experience of applying psychology in different contexts.
• Experience of representing psychology within multidisciplinary care.
• Lived experience of mental health.

Skills & Abilities

• Knowledge and understanding of the development of eating disorder and ability to demonstrate compassion for the lived experience of this illness.
• Skills in complex methods of psychological assessment, intervention and management that frequently require sustained and intense concentration and highly developed analytical and judgement skills.
• Skills in individual and group work and programme planning, planning and organising for caseload management, and self‑management including time management.
• Well‑developed communication skills, verbally and in writing, to convey complex, highly technical or clinically sensitive information, including contentious and distressing information, to service users, families, carers and professional colleagues both within and outside the NHS.
• Ability to identify and employ mechanisms of clinical governance, including regular supervision, to support and maintain clinical practice in the face of exposure to highly emotive material and challenging behaviour.
• Evidence of continuing professional development as recommended by the HCPC.
• Formal training in supervision of other psychologists.
• Knowledge of the theory and practice of specialised psychological therapies for difficult‑to‑treat groups (e.g. eating disorder, personality disorder, dual diagnoses, people with additional disabilities).
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, enabling networks with professionals within the Trust and other agencies to promote effective team working with service users.
• Able to contain and work with high levels of distress from service users.
• Able to contain and work with high levels of organisational stress.
• Interpersonally calm and able to defuse difficult, volatile situations.
• Motivated towards personal and professional development with a strong CPD record.

Physical Requirements

• Able to work independently.
• Able to travel to different locations in the community.

All appointments for new employees to CPFT are subject to the successful completion of a probationary period.

Applicants who require entry into the UK will be required to provide a valid police certificate from the relevant authority from each country (except the UK) where the applicant has been present for 12 months or more, 10 years before the date of visa application, while aged 18 or over.

As an equal opportunities’ employer, we welcome applications from all sections of the community, particularly underrepresented groups including people with long‑term conditions and members of our ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ communities.

You must have appropriate UK professional registration. This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exemptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and a disclosure to the Disclosure and Barring Service will be required.

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