Last Updated on 21/08/2023
There are a number of limitations in the way the clinical psychology profession has traditionally operated:
- Services often have a focus on individuals’ mental health needs
- Community engagement work is often short-term and not sustained
- There are effective ways to reduce inequality and improve wellbeing that clinical psychology does not often use
- Certain parts of the population are not well served by clinical psychology and find services hard to access
- Clinical psychologists are rarely visible in the communities in which they work
- Clinical psychology is not as visible or accessible to society as other professions, e.g. in terms of engaging with the media and politics
Clinical psychology training courses have traditionally also reflected these limitations, e.g.
- placements are mostly focused on ‘downstream’ interventions and lack a preventative focus
- placements do not always have a direct link into the communities they serve
- placements often do not provide opportunities for trainees to work with groups or individuals whose needs aren’t met by typical NHS services, e.g. marginalised or ‘hard-to-reach’ populations.
The NHS Long Term Plan commits to both improving and widening access to mental health care for our population. This is accompanied by a significant planned increase in the number of DClinPsy training places nationally. This presents an opportunity to consider how the above limitations could be reduced as part of a review of the organisation of placements on the Lancaster DClinPsy programme, and how the additional trainee capacity can be best used.
The Clinical Psychology Engagement Team Development and Implementation Group (CPET DIG) has been established to discuss these issues and challenges, with the aims of increasing community engagement activities within the programme and monitoring progress of current engagement workstreams that are taking place.
The intended outcomes of the group include increasing the number of placements for trainees, and widening placement opportunities to involve more preventative and community-focused work, as well as bringing a clearer preventative and community psychology ethos to the programme in general.
We hope that having opportunities to engage in community/preventative placement work becomes the norm for all trainees. Ultimately, we hope that this will result in both shaping the experience and skill sets of future clinical psychologists, and psychological thinking brought into services and communities that do not have it at present.
Membership
The CPET DIG is comprised of the following:
- Members of the DClinPsy programme staff
- LUPIN members
- Trainee representatives
The terms of reference for the group, as well as membership and meeting frequency are currently under review, with the aim of re-establishing the group in the autumn of 2023.