Mental Health Clinician

The department is committed to keeping Queensland communities safe, supporting victims, and actively tackling the complex causes of youth crime and targeting serious repeat offenders. We do this by providing early intervention, statutory Youth Justice, and detention services to ensure that young people are held accountable for their offending behaviour. We help support them to become responsible members of the community.

More information about the department is available from Queensland Government, Department of Youth Justice.

As a Youth Detention Centre (YDC) Mental Health Clinician you will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team of allied health professionals to provide high-quality, culturally appropriate clinical and therapeutic services to young people in youth detention.

A strong knowledge of developmental and cognitive assessments will be a critical asset in this role.

Key responsibilities

As a Mental Health Clinician, you will specifically:

• Provide quality clinical knowledge, services and skill to support collaborative case planning and tailored therapeutic interventions for young people in youth detention.
• Complete discipline specific assessments and reports for young people in youth detention centres.
• Develop, deliver, and contribute to behaviour support strategies assessments, intervention planning and management for young people who present with complex and challenging behaviours.
• Coordinate and facilitate the multi-disciplinary and multi-agency suicide risk management process for young people, which will include collaboratively developing and reviewing safety intervention strategies and suicide prevention plans to ensure these accurately reflect stakeholder input and are available to a range of stakeholders for case planning purposes.
• Support coordinated and integrated service responses across multi-disciplinary teams and stakeholders within youth detention centres in Queensland.
• Actively coordinate and participate in clinical case conferences and case management activities.
• Provide specialised practice and case management advice to internal and external stakeholders, including interagency collaborative panels, Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT), Queensland Ombudsman Inspector of Detention Services, National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), Child Safety, Department of Education, Queensland Health and other agencies, regarding the clinical care and management of young people in the Youth Detention Centre.
• Demonstrate cultural capability and communicate effectively and sensitively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, understanding the historical impacts of First Nations people in institutional settings, to ensure holistic service provision that takes cultural protocols, influences and events into consideration.
• Lead regular peer collaboration and allocated case discussions to support clinical learning and development opportunities and continuous practice improvement contribute to the shared co-ordination of discipline specific daily tasks to independently deliver high quality work.
• Contribute to strategic and operational planning, policy and practice development, and quality improvement reviews.
• Understand the complexities of a high-risk environment and assist with the safety and security of the youth detention centres by adhering to operational procedures as required.
• Apply independent professional judgement, based on valid and reliable evidence, to a complex caseload to continuously contribute to the development of evidence based allied health services.
• Support the delivery of specialised training to detention centre staff to assist their work with young people who have complex needs. Training content will include neurodevelopmental disability, mental health, trauma-informed practice, suicide risk and communicating with young people.
• Undertake professional supervision, training and development, as agreed with the Clinical Practice Leader to ensure the maintenance of discipline specific registration requirements and provision of quality client services.

Applications to remain current for 12 months.