This role is offered on a permanent basis. The hours are part-time, 30 hours per week.
We are seeking a dynamic and motivated Counselling Clinical Lead to join our established Gloucestershire NHS Talking Therapies service. This is a newly created post designed to support the continued development of our counselling offer and strengthen clinical leadership across the service.
About you:
* Qualified Counsellor with professional accreditation (e.g., BACP,UKCP).
A Postgraduate Qualification in one of the NICE approved counselling modalities below:
Person Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression (PCE CfD)
Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)
Brief Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT)
Couples Therapy for Depression (CTfD)
* Substantial post‑qualification experience within NHS Talking Therapies or related settings.
* Strong leadership and supervisory skills.
* Enthusiastic about service development and innovation.
* Excellent interpersonal and organisational skills.
* Committed to collaborative working and clinical excellence.
Main Duties of the Job
* Provide clinical leadership, guidance, and supervision to counselling staff.
* Lead on the development and expansion of counselling provision across the service.
* Ensure adherence to clinical governance, audit, and quality standards.
* Support workforce wellbeing, development, and reflective practice.
* Work closely with senior leaders to guide service strategy and quality improvement.
* Promote high-quality, evidence‑based, client‑centred care.
* Contribute to clinical pathways, service design, and evaluation.
* Support staff to deliver exceptional care while building a strong, resilient service.
The qualification, training & experience requirements for the role are underlined in the Job Description/Person Specification.
We have a skilled and dedicated workforce of over 5000 colleagues working in a diverse range of services over 55 sites and within people's homes. We strive to enable a welcoming workplace culture that builds and celebrates civility, inclusivity and diversity, while providing a sense of belonging and trust.
Annual staff surveys, regular Pulse surveys and other engagement opportunities provide our people with lots of opportunity to tell us about their experiences of working with us. In the latest staff survey, 61% of colleagues gave us their views. It was great to hear that:
72% of colleagues would recommend the Trust as a place to work, ranking us 1st for Provider Trusts in the South West region on this question.
76% would recommend the standard of care provided in our services if a friend or relative needed treatment, also ranking us 1st in the South West region.
81% said that care of patients and service users is the Trust's priority, compared with an average in comparable NHS Trusts in England of 64%.
This high-level overview shows we are in a healthy position, with higher scores than average for comparable organisations, alongside a great response rate, indicating good staff engagement. However, we also know we have plenty of room for improvement in many areas. To that end, we continue to prioritise and invest in our commitment to genuinely becoming a Great Place to Work with consistent top-quartile performance in the annual staff survey and Pulse surveys.
* To develop and oversee a supervision model that supports the NHS Talking Therapies service counselling clinicians in their work with people with the NHS Talking Therapy Service.
* Provide clinical supervision for the NHS Talking Therapies counselling staff.
* To establish and maintain effective communications within and external to the NHS Talking Therapies service, across Gloucestershire's health services and partner agencies and organisations.
* To provide training, consultancy and supervision in NHs Talking Therapies approved counselling modalities and psychological approaches to a range of qualified/unqualified mental health/non-mental health staff within primary mental health, primary care, secondary mental health care in Gloucestershire and to other agencies as required.
* Services will be delivered in a wide range of settings and locations: educational facilities, GP practices, office/clinics etc.
* Flexible working arrangements within 37.5 hours per week, with core service hours of 8am – 8pm.
CORE KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Clinical
* Accept referrals via agreed protocols within the service.
* Assess clients for suitability for CBT and other relevant psychological interventions.
* Make decisions on suitability of new referrals, adhering to the department's referral protocols, and refer unsuitable clients on to the relevant service or back to the referral agent as necessary.
* Formulate, implement and evaluate therapy programmes for clients.
* Plans and prioritises workload, exercising autonomous professional responsibility for the assessment, treatment and discharge of clients whose problems are managed by psychologically based treatment plans.
* Provide clinical supervision to and support the psychological work of other clinical staff that provides psychologically based care and treatment.
* Evaluate clinical competence of staff using a performance framework and standard tools of measurement relevant to clinical modality e.g. equivalent to CTS(R) for CBT.
* Educate and involve family members and others in treatment as necessary, conveying psychological formulations with sensitivity in easily understood language.
* Adhere to an agreed activity contract relating to the number of client contacts offered, and clinical sessions carried out per week to minimise waiting times and ensure treatment delivery remains accessible and convenient.
* Attend multi-disciplinary meetings relating to referrals or clients in treatment, where appropriate.
* Complete all requirements relating to data collection within the service.
* Keep coherent records of all clinical activity in line with service protocols.
* Work closely with other members of the team ensuring appropriate step-up and step-down arrangements are in place to maintain a stepped care approach.
* Assess and integrate issues surrounding work and employment into the overall therapy process.
* Carry out clinical audits of service performance, including service user surveys and evaluations, and help to collate and disseminate the results for feedback.
Training and Supervision
* Deliver and fulfil all the requirements of the supervision structure.
* To ensure that other staff, professionals, and managers (across a range of agencies and settings) have access to a psychologically based framework for the understanding and care of clients of the service, through the provision of specialist psychological advice, guidance and consultation and the sharing of psychological research and theory.
* To provide training to others as relevant to service need.
please read the detailed Job Description and Person specification for full details.
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