What is a paediatric clinical psychologist?
Paediatric clinical psychologists have been trained to help understand how people think, feel and behave.
We work with children/young people who have health problems, and with their families. Our job is to help families with any problems that they have that are linked to health problems. Health problems can affect our lives in lots of different ways.
What kind of problems does a paediatric clinical psychologist help with?
We work with children/young people and families with a range of problems.
Problems include:
- Difficulties with coping and adjusting to health problems.
- Dealing with the effects of health problems on your life – for example how health problems may affect friends, family and school.
- Worries about treatments or staying in hospital.
- Discussing how talk to other people about your health problems and deal with their responses.
- Making decisions about treatment.
- Worries about school and schoolwork.
- Dealing with teasing and bullying.
- Concerns about your appearance.
- Worries about the future.
- Eating, sleeping, behaviour and toileting issues.
How can seeing a paediatric clinical psychologist help?
Paediatric clinical psychologists use lots of different methods to help young people. We are trained in a range of psychological therapies. Psychological therapies are ways of helping people and families to make changes to the ways they think, feel and behave, to help them feel like they can cope better with any difficulties they have.
Psychological therapies might involve talking, drawing, answering questions and thinking together about any problems or worries that you have. We might ask you to practice the things that we work on.
What happens in your first appointment with a paediatric clinical psychologist?
We will meet with you and your parents and carers and we will listen carefully to what you all have to say.
We will ask you questions about how things are for you at the moment, what you were like when you were younger and what you would like to happen in the future.
We will talk about what you would like to work on together. We will try to understand these difficulties and we will think about how we can help.
We might ask if you and your parent and carers would like to spend time talking to us on your own. It is up to you if this is something you want to do or not.
Sometime we ask children/young people and their parents and carers to fill in some questionnaires. We might ask if it would be ok to talk to a teacher at your school or to talk to someone in the medical team(s) that looks after you. Together we will make a plan about what will happen next.
You can write any questions you have about coming to see a psychologist.
Important information
- We will not see you unless you and your parents and carers give us permission.
- We will take notes during our appointments with you; these notes will be kept safely and securely in the psychology department.
- We will ask you and/or your parents and carers for permission to share information or to talk to other professionals about you.
- However, if we are worried about your safety, or the safety of somebody else, we have a duty to take appropriate action, this may include telling other people what you have said to us.
