Graduate Psychology Education Programs - The proposed Graduate Psychology Education (GPE) project seeks to fulfill the primary objective for the larger GPE program: “Increase the number of well-trained, culturally competent health service psychology students, interns, and post-doctoral residents, who are both prepared to address the needs of the communities they serve and committed to working in high need and high demand areas after graduation”. This project will achieve this by giving doctoral students in-depth training in high-need primary care from their earliest experiences. It brings together a partnership with Nebraska’s oldest mental health training program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two Federally Qualified Health Centers, and a Tribal Health Service. Five students per year will be drawn from the Clinical Psychology Training Program (CPTP) at UNL and placed across the three primary care sites. Each of these sites qualifies as Health Provider Shortage Areas and they build from existing partnerships. Students placed at these sites will be in their latter stages of training, having already completed their master’s degrees. To prepare students for these placements, the CPTP will continue revising its curriculum in multiple ways. First, we will continue revising foundational courses to prepare students for work in primary care and other integrated medical settings with an emphasis on bridging care access gaps. Placements will ensure that students receive experiential training in integrated care with at least 25% of their efforts devoted to screening or treatment of substance use disorders. Second, we will enhance the didactic training that specifically supports these placements, beginning with a week-long seminar and continuing with multiple workshops throughout the placement year. These workshops will focus on the key areas as stated in the funding announcement: substance use disorders, trauma-informed care, and care for children, adolescents, and transitional age youth. Third, we will supplement this training with external workshops focusing on integrated care and use of technology. We will conduct an in-person workshop with experts in the integration of technology with care, including innovative use of tele-behavioral health. We will have ongoing consultation in from these experts. Finally, we will conduct an annual, in-depth review of the program, collating program evaluation data from multiple sources. The proposed project will include an external expert in this review for continuous and rapid cycle improvement. The proposed project builds on successful initiatives to train students in primary care, including a previously funded GPE project. Specifically, our program qualifies for both funding priority and funding preference. For funding priority, we have successfully trained students in primary care settings for nearly six years. The first student to receive this training has now graduated and is working in a primary care setting in a HRSA-designated Health Provider Shortage area. Most recently, five prior GPE trainees matched for internship (the final external training experience required for graduation). Four of these students went to sites emphasizing integrated care. These four students also represented half of the all students who matched for internship from the larger CPTP program. For funding preference, the larger CPTP has graduated 14 students over the last two academic years. A sizeable majority of these students (10; 71.4%) are now working in HRSA-designated Medically Underserved Areas or Health Provider Shortage Areas. Taken together, the CPTP overall and the prior GPE project specifically have demonstrated high levels of success in all priority areas for HRSA’s GPE program. Our training plan builds from this success to continue training health service psychology students to meet behavioral health needs in high need and underserved places.
