Cambridge Adult Locality Team

Would you like to join our friendly, dynamic and busy adult locality team here in the beautiful historic city of Cambridge. The teams here at Union House offer assessment and treatment for people with moderate to severe mental illness. 

There is ample opportunity to develop your skills and knowledge, both by accessing training opportunities and working closely with very experienced colleagues.  Your ideas to help shape the service are always welcome and as a member of the team you will be invited to be actively involved in service improvement.

The service is a multidisciplinary team, which values greatly the skill sets that the various disciplines bring. Service delivery and care is very service user focused and seeks to deliver high quality effective treatment, care and support.

We are always looking for individuals who have a strong team work ethic, sense of accountability, accompanied by an ability to work under pressure at times, and with a desire for innovation. We are able to support agile working for staff, using all appropriate I.T equipment and support, and have a secure area for staff bicycles. The city provides a good opportunity to be active at work, with staff being able to cycle to local appointments.

Having a strong and historical relationship with the University of Cambridge, we can be, and are, engaged with interesting and innovative projects related to research into and the treatment of mental ill health.

You will have the opportunity to manage a caseload of diverse service users, delivering a range of clinical skills and building a therapeutic and recovery-based relationship. We seek to empower service users to actively engage in their recovery journey, working toward an effective discharge with ongoing support from a wide range of third sector organisations and support.

To this end a great deal of work has gone into developing programmes for treatment and interventions which includes;

Reablement
Family work
Sensory integration

Brief psychological interventions delivered by the team include;

Brief solution focused therapy
Distress tolerance
Anxiety management
Behavioural activation
Grounding and stabilisation

This service covers both Cambridge city and the surrounding rural areas; therefore, successful applicants will need to be able to travel independently. We are pleased to inform candidates that there is the potential for new staff to access affordable accommodation and for those applicants who are out of area, relocation costs are available.

We are happy to meet you and welcome any enquires as an opportunity to discuss your skills and motivation and to be able to explain what we can offer you in terms of supporting your career aspirations.

Research

The Cambridge Adult Locality Teams (CALTs) published two papers from projects evaluating the Brief Psychological Interventions (BPIs) they have developed for adult mental health services. These approaches provide key elements of psychological therapies over fewer sessions, which can be delivered by staff with less specialised training to provide effective short-term mental health support.

The team found that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) based  BPIs for anxiety and depression  are helpful for people with mild to moderate mental health problems. They also reviewed an  intervention to treat distress  and saw significant improvements in participants’ distress tolerance, mood, anxiety and wellbeing. These initial evaluations with small cohorts over a few years highlight the potential of this new way of working, supporting more staff in care teams to deliver psychological therapies.

Maggie Page, service manager for CPFT’s Cambridge Adult Locality Teams (North and South) said: “We are really proud of the teams and commend their dedication to improving mental health therapy services during challenging times. These projects really are a fantastic team effort, with clinical and support staff working together to find evidence for best practice. Delivering brief interventions offers great development and experience for our support workers, while increasing access to timely and effective therapies for more people with common mental health problems in our community.”

CALTs are CPFT’s powerhouse for developing and evaluating brief psychological therapies, building the evidence base for effective interventions and training staff in these innovative approaches. In 2019, they impressed delegates at the World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (WCBCT) in Berlin,  showcasing nine of their projects  in the poster exhibition.