A clinical psychologist will work to support people experiencing a wide range of mental or physical health problems. Clinical psychologists can work amongst many settings including prisons, hospitals, schools, community health centres and in social care. The role of a clinical psychologist can massively vary between services. Therefore, there are many different jobs that Clinical Psychologists can undertake as part of their role to meet the service needs.
Below are some examples of common roles Clinical Psychologists may do as part of their role:
- Attending meets with other professionals to provide a psychological perspective to a client’s care
- One-to-one work with clients to help them understand their difficulties (formulation)
- Facilitating reflective practice with staff to support them to support service-users
- Providing training/teaching to other professionals
- Undertaking clinical audits/service development projects to improve the service
- Providing consultations/debriefs to staff
- Attending MDT meetings
- Psychometric testing to help assessment e.g. assessing a client for a learning disability
- Risk assessment and management – ensuring service-users are safe
- Conducting and writing up research
- Keeping up to date with research to ensure professional development
- Supervising other members of staff
- Providing therapy using specific models or integrating models
- Facilitate group therapy sessions from a variety of models, covering psychoeducation and skills intervention
- Writing notes/reports to support clinical decisions and recommendations for care
What does a clinical psychologist do?
As we can see above a clinical psychologist has many aspects to their role. Many people assume that they are therapists, but the truth is a clinical psychologist has much more to their identity. As a clinical psychologist you would not only be working therapeutically with service-users, you would also be working with teams, as part of larger systems, and working to develop and influence change.
Here is a brief insight into the elements that make up a clinical psychologist:
