Experience

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  Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

  • United Kingdom
  • Mental Health Care
  • 700 & Above Employee

  • Trainee Clinical Psychologist

    • Oct 2023 - Present

    I am currently employed within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS Tier 3), where our focus is on providing a comprehensive range of treatments and assessments for children and young people aged 5-18 facing moderate to severe mental health challenges. Within our service, we adopt a collaborative approach, actively engaging with young individuals, their parents, extended families, schools, social care, and crisis teams. This collaboration aims to foster a thorough understanding of the young person's presenting difficulties.In addition to managing my caseload, I have been fortunate to join our team's family therapy clinic. In this setting, I work alongside our team of experienced and qualified Family therapists who provide valuable support as we approach therapy from a systemic perspective. This involves navigating and addressing various perspectives within the family dynamic, contributing to a more holistic and effective therapeutic support system.

  • Trainee Clinical Psychologist

    • Sep 2022 - Present

    I worked within a Structured Clinical Management Team (SCM) and an Integrated Recovery Hub service; both teams specialised in supporting individuals who have endured significant trauma and who have a diagnosis of a personality disorder, presenting with moderate to severe risk. My role involved conducting comprehensive assessments, developing personalised care plans, and offering individualised and group-based therapy using evidence-based interventions.

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  West London Mental Health NHS Trust

  • London, England, United Kingdom

  • Senior Assistant Clinical Psychologist (Band 5 in Tier 3&4 Services)

    • Apr 2021 - Aug 2022
    • London, England, United Kingdom

    I am currently working for the Ealing Provider Collaborative which involves working alongside the Operational Service Managers, Clinical Directors of the Trust and Commissioners. We work with a range of Tier 4 units across England. However locally we work closely with the Priory Roehampton, Priory North London and Lavender Walk. We also work with Tier 3 CAMHS teams (children’s mental health teams in the community) to engage with Tier 4 units when an admission is unavoidable due to the young person’s presenting level of needs. The New Care Models (NCM) aims to ensure admissions to Tier 4 units (Children’s mental health hospitals) are supported to place young people as close to home as possible and for the shortest time possible. Our service covers eight boroughs from West London Health Trust (WLHT) and Central North West London (CNWL). This was previously known as New Models of Care (NMOC). We reports directly to financial and clinical directors from WLHT and CNWL as well as NHS England case managers.I currently lead on service-user involvement which focuses on service improvements, having accessible services for all who require support, learning from experiences and working collaboratively with service-users to provide effective support. Under clinical supervision I will support a number of young people within an eating disorders service, I will also be setting up and facilitating some parenting groups to support families with young people in an in-patient unit, attend regular case escalation meetings for our Tier 4 units, attend CPA and CRAFT meetings for young people, Conduct service evaluations, audits and write-up clinical reports. My role also allows me to work collaboratively within the adult in-patient units. Setting up a range of clinical training to ensure staff are able to continuously improve their clinical competencies and feel able to support the level of risk we work in.

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  Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust

  • London, United Kingdom

  • Assistant Clinical Psychologist

    • Sep 2018 - Apr 2021
    • London, United Kingdom

    Working within Greenwich CAMHS Looked After Children and Adolescent Crisis Team, my role involved both clinical as well as research-based tasks. Some of my clinical tasks involved undertaking Initial Assessments, conducting neuro-psychological tests, self-report measures, direct and indirect structured observations. In addition, I facilitated parent groups (NVR), unusual experiences groups with young people on the EIP pathway, held a caseload of young people who I provided one-to-one therapy for a range of mental health needs, liaised with social care, schools, attended PEP reviews, LAC reviews and child protection conferences for the young people on my caseload. My role also required me to assist in the development of psychologically based frameworks which provides an understanding of care and the benefit to all young people within our service, across all settings where care takes place. By providing monthly reports on multi-disciplinary clinical activity as requested by the supervising clinical psychologist and team managers. Research tasks involved: assisting with the design and implementation of audit as well as research projects. Undertaking data collection, analysis, the production of reports and summaries, using IT and statistical programmes. Alongside conducting evidence-based literature and research to assist qualified clinical psychologists in evidence-based practice in individual work and work with other team members.

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  Prendergast Hilly Fields School

  • London, United Kingdom

  • Assistant Clinical Psychologist

    • Jan 2018 - Jul 2018
    • London, United Kingdom

    I facilitated a well-being group within an all-girls secondary school. This focus group is design to enable the girls to have a safe place to talk. The group looks at the girls first reactions to stressful situations, anxiety, friendships and low-moods. We explore as a group alternative ways of dealing with situations that causes stress, anxiety, low-moods and friendship breakdowns. The girls are also taught to recognize signs in their bodies that they are becoming stressed, anxious or feeling low in mood, in order to seek support. The school has a lot in place to support well-being, so girls are informed of this support and encouraged to speak out when they need this support. Each session ends by doing breathing exercises, where girls are encouraged to be still for a moment with their thoughts and then a realistic ‘Me-Time' simple task is set for girls which they decide on. The next session always starts by finding out how this task went.

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  South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (Croydon IAPT Bethlem Royal Hospital)

  • Beckenham

  • Assistant Clinical Psychologist

    • Jul 2017 - Oct 2017
    • Beckenham

    I am working within Croydon IAPT's Triage Team. This involved doing telephone assessments and then sign posting referrals to the appropriate therapy in the service or to another service which may be better suited to the clients complex and specific needs. My role involves liaising with GP's, Crisis teams, clients, counseling services, bereavement services and addiction/rehabilitation services. I assess people who experience a range of difficulties, that they are seeking support for such as anxiety (this could be generalized, social or specific phobia's which cause anxiety), low moods/depression, OCD, eating disorders, self-harm, experiencing suicidal thoughts and in some cases acting on these thoughts to clients with personality disorders and individual's who are suffering with Psychosis or manic episodes.

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  South West London and St Georges Mental Health Trust

  • Merton CAMHS Neurodevelopmental disorders (Mitcham)

  • Assistant Clinical Psychologist (Band 5)

    • Jan 2017 - May 2017
    • Merton CAMHS Neurodevelopmental disorders (Mitcham)

    My role involves liaising with parents, schools, social workers, and other health professionals’ pre and post diagnosis. This is due to concern surrounding a child presenting with traits within the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). By collecting information from these sources (School reports, SALT reports, Education psychology reports, and Occupational therapy report) alongside analysis screening questionnaires such as Conners, SCQ, SDQ, ASQ, and RCADS and ensuring results are clearly written within the pre-report. Helps to inform the Clinical Psychologist within the Parent-Base Interview (when using 3D1, ADI-R, DISCO or a comprehensive developmental history: Semi-structured interview) about the child in an holistic manner. I am then expected to conduct an Individual Play-Based Assessments with the child, which is influenced by ADOS-2/ADOS-3/ADOS4 depending on the children’s age or capability. Findings from the Play-Base assessment are then shared with the Clinical Psychologist before feedback is given to the parent(s) in a post assessment diagnosis discussion. All information gathered by the Clinical Psychologist and myself (Assistant Clinical Psychologist) is then placed into a diagnostic or non-diagnostic report (post-assessment) which is sent out to parents, schools and medical professionals involved in the child’s care stating whether a diagnosis of ASD or ADHD can be given or not based on assessment outcomes.

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  South London and Maudsley Health Trust/ Lewisham IAPT

  • Lewisham

  • Assistant Psychologist (Band 5)

    • May 2016 - Sep 2016
    • Lewisham

    Working within Lewisham IAPT’s Triage Team. This involved, being responsible for conducting telephone assessments to identify suitable treatment within Lewisham IAPT for patients as well as sign posting referrals to other services if required.

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  South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust

  • Ealing

  • Assistant Clinical Psychologist (Band 5)

    • Jan 2015 - Apr 2016
    • Ealing

    My role involved setting up and co-facilitating Newly Diagnoses Memory Therapy Groups and Cognitive Stimulation Therapy groups CST. These groups provided support to patient’s with dementia. Due to the success of these groups, I was able to introduce setting up groups in other languages to ensure accessibility to a wider range of service users. With the approval of the Clinical Psychologist I was also able to approach the Ealing Community Transport team ECT. I was able to negotiate with the CEO of ECT to support patients who were less mobile and extremely isolate, with getting to these therapy groups. ECT has now provided transport for over 14 therapy groups in the past year. Under the supervision of the Clinical Psychologist I was able to provide one-to-one support for carers living with Dementia, implementing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as part of the 'START' programme.I had a small caseload of patients which I was responsible for; I maintained a record of all forms of communication, outcome all therapy sessions on RIO. Ensured patient’s progress notes were kept up to date. Maintained records of observations on patients I saw within care homes who presented challenging behaviours and monitoring patient outcomes under supervision. I organized involvement meetings for all the Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Services within the South West London Mental Health Trust (Ealing, Hounslow and Hammersmith) and for the carers within these boroughs. These meeting involved looking at the service leaflets, website information, service users’ first contact with the service and the information we provide carers living with dementia. Ensuring families and service users were given effective and useful insight into the support we could provide and how they could plan for the future.http://ectcharity.co.uk/news/story/dementia-patients-back-on-track-with-big-green-bus

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  Rise Up to shine

  • Lewisham

  • Youth Ambassador

    • Nov 2013 - Jan 2016
    • Lewisham

    My role involved working with parents and children on two projects in order to create awareness through interactive activities within a safe environment which provides support and guidance to these families in an attempt to empower young minds. Project 1: This project involved children and parents getting involved in create exercises followed by a healthy balance breakfast, while educating parents on the issues surrounding childhood obesity and how parent can support their children to prevent the health risks which are associated to childhood obesity.Project 2: This project is ongoing and is aimed at reducing antisocial behaviours within the local community, tackling specifically youth gangs. This is through youth talks, debates/ discussions on drugs, knife and gun crimes, within an environment which gives young people a voice in which they could talk freely and feel safe to do so in.

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  West London mental health trust NHS/ Ealing council

  • Ealing

  • Assistant Clinical Psychologist (Band 5)

    • Jun 2013 - Oct 2013
    • Ealing

    My role involved working within a primary intensive intervention project to prevent children at risk of being taken into care or who are in foster care and at risk of being placed into a residential home placement. Working with children aged 5-11, alongside social services, child protection cases, schools and any other agencies who may have worked with the family in the pass. My main duties involved working on literature reviews surrounding children at risk of placement breakdown, looking at pass interventions, evidence base theories of attachment, parenting skills and types, neuro –research surrounding parenting. Developing semi-structured interview questions, questionnaires for professionals involved with families, Visits to school and family homes, Meetings with social services and assisting within interventions with children and families

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  Twin

  • Lewisham

  • Mentor

    • Mar 2013 - Jun 2013
    • Lewisham

    My role involved working with lone parents who have been out of work for some time, develop their self-esteem and confidence in order to return to the workplace. This involved running focus groups exploring self-beliefs, identifying barriers which influence negative self-beliefs, low self-esteem and ways in which these barriers can be overcome through role playing exercises. The group also worked on developing their CV’s, common mistakes made on application forms, interviewing technics and team building exercises in an attempt to build on their self-confidence

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  Care Plus

  • Assistant Clinical Psychology (Band 5)

    • Sep 2011 - Jul 2012

    Preparing and facilitating a current affairs focus group for patients, dealing with one-to-one outings in an attempt to promote integration for patients within their local community. Recognizing challenging behaviours and situations early, in order to effectively mediate and maintain potentially high risk situations. Assisting the clinical psychologist with written behavioural observations on patients, conducting clinical audits, alongside my independent research into the effects of overt aggression on therapeutic outcomes for my Master’s thesis.

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  Goldsmiths, University of London

  • Lewisham

  • Outreach Child and Adolescence Case Worker

    • Nov 2008 - Jul 2011
    • Lewisham

    I worked within several local Secondary schools and College, counselling and mentoring young adolescence with learning difficulties and behavioural issues.

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  U8’s play scheme

  • Catford

  • Assistant Manager

    • Mar 2006 - Aug 2006
    • Catford

    My duties involved the formulation of policies for this organisation in their preparation for their upcoming Ofsted inspection before opening as a new play scheme in south London.

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  Creative Minds Nursery

  • Camberwell

  • Nursery Manager

    • Jan 2003 - Mar 2006
    • Camberwell

    My responsibilities involved dealing with school fees, writing letters to parents, dealing with the maintenance of nursery resources, staff appraisal, Ofsted preparation, social services and the day to day running of the nursery.

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  Little Saints Nursery

  • Peckham

  • Deputy Nursery Manager

    • Sep 1999 - Jan 2003
    • Peckham

    Organizing and planning the nursery’s curriculum, dealing with fees, writing reports on children, as well as organizing and fund raising for school trips.