skip header and navigation
HHS Home  Bureau of Health Professions Questions? Search
HRSA Home
Photos of Health Professions
HRSA Home
Grants
Student Assistance
National Health Service Corps
National Center for Health Workforce Analysis
Health Professional Shortage Areas
Medicine & Dentistry - Medicine & Dentistry
Medicine & Dentistry
Nursing
Diversity
Area Health Education Center
Public Health
Other Disciplines
Children Hospitals GME
Practioner Data Banks
Practioner Data Banks
FY 2007 Graduate Psychology Education Grantee Abstracts

California | Colorado | Connecticut | Deleware | District of Columbia | Georgia | Illinois | Missouri | Nebraska | New Mexico | New York | North Carolina | Oklahoma | Pennsylvania | Tennessee | Virginia | West Virginia

California

D40 HP 00041975
Gilbert Newman, Ph.D.
Department of Field Placement
The Wright Institute
2728 Durant Avenue
Berkeley, California  94704
Tel:  510-841-9230, Ext. 110
E-mail:  gnewman@wrightinst.edu

IHPTP allows the Wright Institute, an APA accredited graduate program in Berkeley, CA to expand education and training to students working in primary care with under- and uninsured patients.  Wright has offered limited training at the Berkeley Primary Care (BPC) Access Clinic since 2004.  BPC is one of 8 clinics operated by LifeLong Medical Care (LMC), a federally designated community health center (Title III, Section 330), providing health and social services to underserved people of all ages in Alameda County, California.  Currently, four Wright trainees are placed at BPC, serving adult clients.  The proposed program will add 8 students and utilize two additional training/service sites at LMC.  IHPTP will expand services to children, adolescents, families and the elderly.  IHPTP promotes an integrated approach to health services and access to physical and mental health care for culturally diverse and disadvantaged consumers.  IHPTP goals are to: 1) improve care to LMC consumers; 2) prepare an emerging psychology workforce to address the whole person through an integrated mind/body approach to health; and 3) promote collaboration between psychologists and other health services providers.

LMC consumers are:  96% low-income, 40% medically uninsured, and 76% non-white. Many consumers are homeless, unemployed or working poor, and regularly experience hunger. LMC patients seek treatment for uncontrolled chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, chronic pain, and HIV/AIDS. The primary unmet health need of this target population is for psychological assessment and counseling for mental health issues impacting overall health. The physicians at LMC clinics are unprepared to address psychological issues that affect the health of patients. Many patients suffer from stress, addiction, depression, and other mental health disorders. IHPTP utilizes a collaborative model pairing a psychology trainee in the examination room with a physician. While the physician focuses on medical issues and physical health, the trainee provides psychological services to patients.

Colorado

D40 HP 00041626
Deborah J. Seymour, Ph.D.
Psychiatry/Family Medicine
University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center
Mail Stop  C268-71
4200 East Ninth Avenue
Aurora, Colorado  80045
Tel: 720-848-9094
E-mail:  Deb.Seymour@uchsc.edu

The need for psychologists to serve the underserved and to practice in medically underserved communities has never been greater. The President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Heath (1999) stated that the mental health system in the United States is broken and in need of transformation. For many populations, access to mental health services in a primary care setting is in itself a form of cultural competence because it brings the services to a setting that is familiar and culturally acceptable for many clients to whom a ‘mental health clinic’ is culturally or personally unacceptable. The development of a cadre of health services psychologists who have skills to work in primary care and other health services settings is essential to the transformation that is needed in our health care system.

The objectives of this proposal are to prepare psychology interns to practice in health care settings, particularly primary care health settings, where underserved, minority and other disadvantaged populations seek health and mental health care services. We currently have 7 interns working in 7 different major rotation sites. In 2007-2008 we will have 4 interns working in 4 sites. We will add 2 new health care major rotation sites for the 2008-2009 academic year. The key elements of our work will include a focus on training all of our psychology interns about our nation’s primary care health system, providing the interns with experience in the skills needed to practice in health services settings and training the interns to provide services to a large number of underserved populations including developmentally disabled children, newly arrived refugees, uninsured and monolingual Spanish speaking Latino populations, migrant farm workers, Native Americans, deaf individuals, and incarcerated individuals.

There are two key areas of need that this grant addresses. Serving the underserved and training health services psychologists. We will build the relationships, capacity and curriculum to add new training experiences in a primary care geriatrics clinic, a rural Colorado primary care health clinic and a Federally Qualified Health Center that serves migrant farm workers, Latinos and refugees. Education about special populations, health systems, cultural competence and health disparities will be completed and evaluated by program participants. We will also create an innovative training program in which psychology interns and third year medical students train side by side in rural and inner city primary care health settings. Written materials suitable for publication and presentations for public consumption will be generated in order to report upon our successes and lessons learned in the process of building this program. Evaluation of the effectiveness of the curriculum and its impact on work site selection of program completers will be made.

Connecticut

D40 HP 00041983
Michele Goyette-Ewing, Ph.D.
Child Study Center/School of Medicine
Yale University
230 South Frontage Road
P.O. Box 207900
New Haven, Connecticut  06520
Tel: 203-785-2017
E-mail:  Michele.Goyette-Ewing@yale.edu

The current project will continue to expand and evaluate a model for developing leaders in the field of child psychology through providing graduate interns in psychology with interdisciplinary training experiences that target specific underserved populations and that increase the integration of health care services by creating linkages between health professionals functioning within a variety of programs and agencies.  This project will enhance and expand training opportunities currently offered to psychology interns completing an American Psychological Association (APA) approved internship at the Yale Child Study Center.  Collaborative training opportunities for psychology interns involve physicians completing a child psychiatry residency program and social workers completing a post-masters degree fellowship.  In addition, psychology fellows actively engage in work with underserved children and youth through collaboration and consultation with a variety of other professionals in the community, including primary care physicians, emergency room personnel, pediatricians, school psychologists, child psychiatrists, nurses, teachers, state child welfare case workers, police officers, detention center workers, juvenile probation officers, and social workers.

The project seeks to continue to develop and enhance a newly created training model, by providing clinical and didactic training experiences which allow interns to work with underserved populations across a range of areas.  Training experiences emphasize gaining expertise in Specialty Training areas, while participating in a generalist curriculum of psychological assessment, intervention, consultation, professional development, and research.  These experiences increase access to clinical services and address the needs of underserved populations, including:

  • Children exposed to violence
  • Children affected by HIV/AIDS
  • Children with serious psychiatric illness
  • Children with significant developmental disabilities
  • Children with school-related problems
  • Children diagnosed with serious physical illness

Four psychology interns participate in the proposed project during each training year.  Each intern has an individualized course of study that incorporates didactic and clinical experiences.  Interns are based at the Yale Child Study Center, but engage in multi-agency and multi-disciplinary collaborations through linkages with hospital and community based initiatives.  These experiences are designed to increase the workforce of culturally competent psychologists who can effectively work with, and teach others to work with, medically underserved populations.

Delaware

D40HP00043574
William Douglas Tynan, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of Pediatrics/Behavioral Health
Alfred I. duPont Institute/Hospital for Children, NCC - Wilmington
1600 Rockland Road 1H-11A
Wilmington, Delaware  19803
Tel:  302-651-4552
E-mail:  dtynan@nemours.org

The Nemours Graduate Psychology Education Program proposed here will include training psychology residents to provide screening and implementation of evidence based treatments in primary care settings and child development centers, along with increased training for pediatric residents and advanced practice nurses and community mental health professionals in developmental and behavioral screening and interventions. The model provides a seamless transition from one level of care to another, via the integrated pediatric medicine and psychological services in primary care settings that have been established in medically underserved areas of the state of Delaware.

The proposed program builds on the success of the prior HRSA grants, by incorporating geriatric knowledge into the curriculum, specifically the issues of parenting faced by grandparents; genetic knowledge and ethics particularly pertaining to Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD); and utilizing distance learning methodologies to improve access to continuing education in population based healthcare.  This proposal also provides innovations in the training program through creative use of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), a unique strength of Nemours; and by increasing the number of psychology teaching experiences for residents, including teaching pre-doctoral health professions students and community-based providers.

The proposed project will train 15 health service psychologists over a three-year period.  The training provided will utilize an integrated model of pediatric mental and physical health, will primarily serve African American and Hispanic, Medicaid eligible children residing in an area that is designated as having a shortage of health care professionals and or designated as a medically underserved area.  The program will include completion of the Nemours Pediatric Primary Behavioral Care Modules, as well as six months of supervised clinical experience in primary care settings.

The project will also train 66 pediatric residents and 3 nurse practitioner interns who will complete the Nemours Pediatric Primary Behavioral Care Modules over a three year period, as well as participate in the Behavior Consultation Clinic for four sessions or consult with faculty psychologists on cases seen in continuity pediatric clinic.

Additionally, the project provides cultural competence training for all participants specific to the two primary cultural groups served, and uses distance-learning methodologies to increase the access to such training.

Nemours request special considerations for this collaborative proposal across pediatrics, nursing and psychology; additionally the project qualifies for the Medically Underserved Community Funding Preference demonstrating “High Rate” and “Significant Increase”(see MUC Preference Request Table).

District of Columbia

D40 HP 00041967
Dominicus W. So, Ph.D.
Psychology/ Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Howard University
CB Powell Building, Room N-279
525 Bryant Street, NW.
Washington, D.C.  20059
Tel:  202-806-9462
E-mail:  dso@howard.edu

Needs. Howard fulfills the Healthy People 2010 National Goals to increase quality and years of healthy life, to increase a diverse populations’ access to culturally competent healthcare, and to eliminate health disparities among minorities. We seek to reduce Blacks’ disproportionately high rates of mental illnesses, and increase their utilization of mental health services. In DC, Blacks are the largest ethnic group; 19.3% of its residents and 33% of people under 18 were in poverty in 1997. As much as 1/8 of the population were uninsured in 2000. Howard Unive rsity Hospital is the only historically black university hospital serving the poor. Without the GPEP, we cannot bring well-trained African Americans into the health workforce.

Current trainees. Howard currently has 35 clinical psychology doctoral students and 3 interns.

Service goals and training objectives. Our training in integrated care occurs primarily at 5 hospitals/clinics: Howard University Hospital, Holy Cross Hospital, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Children’s National Medical Center, and the People’s Community Wellness Center (a church-run clinic), where trainees provide bio-psychosocial evaluations, psychotherapy, behavioral consultations, treatment, and prevention programs targeting hypertension, tobacco and substance use, sexual risk-taking, child and maternal health, and medical compliance. We attempt to:

  1. Improve quality of care by (a) evidence-based, best and emerging practices; (b) training students to use culture as a positive force in change; (c) using biopsychosocial assessments; and (d) translating cutting edge research into useful strategies to deal with stress and adversities.
  2. Improve health care delivery by supporting the workforce and service infrastructure. Our current grant afforded us critical infrastructure including competent health psychology supervisors, student stipends, supplies, a health psychology conference for area faculty and students, and improved curriculum and placements.
  3. Eliminate health barriers by maintaining the supply and diversity of health workforce. As the oldest and most prestigious of the HBCUs offering a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, our clinical program has graduated nearly

    100 students, 95% of whom are people of color or engage in eliminating health disparities. With the proposed grant, we can train 38 enrolled minority graduate students and graduate 18 underrepresented minority Ph.D.s. during the proposed training period.
  4. Reduce health disparities by employing a full range of healthcare skills and services to populations with disproportionate share of disease and disability.

Target populations. Virtually all our students go on to treat the underserved: the uninsured, children, women, the incarcerated, and people of color with dire medical and mental health needs.

Georgia

D40 HP 00043571
Paul Alexander Mabe, Ph.D.
School of Medicine/Psychiatry and Health Behavior
Medical College of Georgia
1515 Pope Avenue
Augusta, Georgia  30912
Tel:  706-721-8812
E-mail:  amabe@mail.mcg.edu

This proposal represents a competing continuation application for the MCG-VAMC Consortium Psychology Workforce Development Project (D40 HP00012-02-00). Data indicate that Georgia is a state with significant mental health problems and an inadequate mental health workforce to address these problems. Access to psychologists is particularly limited with Georgia ranking 48th among states in psychologists per capita. Moreover, Georgia is disproportionately low in regard to its psychology workforce development with less than 1 percent of the total internship positions available nationally in a state that ranks 9th in overall population. The three-fold purpose of this project has been to: (1) Enhance the efforts of the MCG-VAMC Psychology Residency Consortium in producing professional and racially/ethnically diverse psychologists who are well prepared for and seek out careers that are directed toward integrated approaches to health care issues, who have experience with and interest in serving in mental health and medically underserved areas, who are well prepared to stay abreast if not lead the way in the development of evidence-based practices in the field of mental health care, and who aspire to cultural competence in their practice; and (2) Expand the capability of the Consortium to recruit and train residents in the mental health care delivery to children and to individuals living with HIV/AIDS-two populations of significant need and limited mental health resources in Georgia. (3) Refine and extend our training in dealing with the special mental health needs of women in health care settings- another population in Georgia that has significant and unmet needs. The project’s efforts have been extensively and uniformly successful, providing broad interdisciplinary training experiences for psychology residents, developing innovative interdisciplinary training/service programs, publishing and nationally presenting the outcomes of these interdisciplinary training efforts, providing clinical services and outreach educational programs for underserved populations in Georgia, and placing a high percentage of program completers in interdisciplinary health care settings that serve underserved populations. At present there are 7 psychology enrollees in the program and the target for the proposed project is to maintain a comparable number of enrollees in the next three years. This project now endeavors to build on these efforts by partnering with Project GREAT (Georgia Recovery-Based Educational Approach to Treatment funded by the Georgia Department of Human Resources), to immerse psychology and psychiatry faculty and residents in the Recovery model of mental health care. Endorsed in 2003 by President Bush’s New Freedom Commission, the Recovery model emphasizes patient freedom and choice in care and facilitates patients and family members in functioning in advisory, teaching, and care-giving roles. This proposed project will endeavor to not only develop Recovery knowledge, skills, and attitudes in our interdisciplinary faculty and trainees but also to incorporate them in a state-wide dissemination project that will target mental health professionals in local and outlying rural counties of Georgia.

Illinois

D40 HP 00041965
Maureen Ann Lacy, Ph.D.
Department of Psychiatry
Biological Sciences Division
The University of Chicago
5841 S. Maryland Avenue, MC 3077
Chicago, Illinois  60637
Tel:  773-834-3930
E-mail:  mLacy@yoda.bsd.uchicago.edu

The University of Chicago is located in the South Side of Chicago, a designated underserved mental health area, with a predominantly older, African American population. The purpose of this grant is to develop, operate and maintain a multidisciplinary training program at The University of Chicago that focuses on the goal of developing health service psychologists who will work with underserved populations.  In order to achieve this goal, faculty from psychology, psychiatry, geriatrics, and social work will work collaboratively to integrate and focus the curriculum and broaden the training sites to community centers, in order to meet the needs of the underserved African American patient population within our community.  Psychology students will train along side trainees from geriatrics, psychiatry, social work, and neurology.  The ultimate goal of this program is to eliminate barriers to care and ultimately eliminate health provider disparities for African Americans.

Missouri

D40 HP 00043579
Terri L. Weaver, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences
Saint Louis University
221 North Grand Boulevard
St. Louis, Missouri  63103
Tel:  314-977-2198
E-mail:  weavert@sLu.edu

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant, albeit underreported and under identified, public health problem. The proposed project extends and enhances a 4-year-old funded program entitled, Pediatric-Psychology Partnership for Abuse Prevention (PPP-AP, http://www.pediatricpsychologypartnership.com). PPP-AP uses culturally competent psychology trainee-pediatric resident and medical trainee pairs to assess for IPV and intervene with underserved women presenting with their children for pediatric care. Pediatric-Psychology Partnership for Dating Violence Prevention would extend IPV assessment and intervention to adolescent patients. The project would train clinical psychology/pediatric trainees to assess for and intervene in adolescent dating violence, utilizing adolescent-specific assessment and intervention materials, and provide these services within University Pediatrics, an ambulatory healthcare setting with a history of successful pediatric-psychology collaboration. The proposed enhancement would reduce issues of health disparity in dating violence by eliminating barriers to care for underserved African American adolescents and by increasing the number of ethnic minority students trained. Five psychology trainees and four pediatric residents would receive in-depth training while 16 pediatric residents and 50 medical students would receive exposure to the project each year. Improved access to care will be achieved by providing assessment and intervention within a standard health care visit. Providing services in this way also encourages trainees of both disciplines to conceptualize, assess, and treat their patients using a framework that emphasizes the inter-relatedness between mental and physical health. A training compact disc (CD) would be developed to reflect interdisciplinary training challenges and successes and with the CD the training process would be exported to other national training programs. Missouri, as a state and Saint Louis City, as a city, is characterized by some of the highest rankings in health disparities for minority’s health in the country. University Pediatrics has a high representation of young, urban-dwelling, low-income adolescents, seeing 2,462 teens between the ages of 12 and 18 each year.

Nebraska

D40 HP 00042013
Joseph Henry Evans, Ph.D.
Munroe-Meyer Institute/Department of Psychology
Board of Regents/University of Nebraska Medical Center
985450 Nebraska Medical Center
Omaha, Nebraska  68198
Tel:  402-559-6408
E-mail:  jevans@unmc.edu

This GPE grant application is designed to address the critical shortage of psychologists treating children, adolescents and families in underserved rural communities.  Increasing the numbers of behavioral health providers in rural underserved areas will be accomplished through an expansion of the psychology internship training program located in the Psychology Department of the Munroe-Meyer Institute at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC).  This “integrated behavioral health internship model” has been created at UNMC and provides:

a) interdisciplinary training experiences in serving children and adolescents with disabilities and their families, and b) integrated “learning through service” clinical experiences in rural primary care settings.  To date, the integrated behavioral health education model has trained, placed, and retained program graduates in primary care rural practices in Columbus, Hastings, Chadron, Gordon, Kearney, Lexington, Crawford, Crete, Nebraska City, and Valley, Nebraska.  With continued funding from the Graduate Psychology Education Program, the behavioral health model will be extended to a minimum of three additional rural sites over the next three years with the goal of providing internship training and placement of interns into integrated behavioral health practices in underserved Health Professions Shortage Areas.  This project will provide training for 18 psychology interns (12 with stipends supported partially from GPB funding), 12 pediatric and family medicine residents, and 20 mid-level mental health practitioner (counseling, marriage and family, and social work) students through supervised interdisciplinary training experiences in rural underserved areas.  Interns will be trained through experiences in interdisciplinary approaches to working with children with disabilities and in methods to effectively provide behavioral care services in rural primary care settings. It is projected that a minimum of 50% of trainees will be attracted to integrated primary care practice with the majority of these providing behavioral health care in rural underserved (HPSA) locations.

New Mexico

D40 HP 00041977
Eve Adams, Ph.D.
Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology
The Regents of New Mexico State University
MSC 3CEP, Box 30001
Las Cruces, New Mexico  88003
Tel:  505-646-1142
E-mail:  eadams@nmsu.edu

The purpose of the NMSU project is to increase the number of trainees in the disciplines of counseling psychology (CP), social work (MSW), and family medicine (FM) who provide integrative, comprehensive primary care in medically underserved committees (MUCs). This goal will be obtained by creating coursework and practical experiences in which trainees from these three disciplines learn about and work collaborative with underserved populations in New Mexico. This collaborative project will involve the APA accredited Ph.D. Program in CP at New Mexico State University (NMSU), the MSW Program at NMSU, and the Southern New Mexico FM Residency Program, located in Las Cruces.

Collaborative training will occur in two contexts. MSW and CP students will take a 3-credit, Interdisciplinary Seminar on US-Mexico Border Health Issues (MPH 563) that uses a problem-based approach to case study analysis designed to instill a broader appreciation of health issues and multidisciplinary collaboration. This course will be co-taught by faculty from all the disciplines. During this experience the MSW and CP students will begin providing services at the FM residency clinic (FMC). In the next semester the students will increase their involvement at the FMC in addition to providing services at other community-based health organizations as part of a practicum titled, “Behavioral Health Practicum”.

This experience will increase the likelihood that trainees will develop an interest in working with underserved and diverse populations, will believe they have the ability to work with this population, and will want to continue to work with underserved groups during internship and beyond. Program completers of the NMSU project will be better prepared to provide culturally competent, multidisciplinary, integrated health care to residents living in MUCs.

Objectives: 1) To increase the number of counseling psychologists (6 students/year = 18 total), social workers (6 students/year = 18 total), and family practice physicians (5-6 residents/year for 3 year residency = 28 total) trained to provide integrated health care to underserved populations in medically underserved areas, particularly along the US-Mexico border.  2) To train students’ in culturally appropriate practices.  3) To enhance trainees’ self-efficacy regarding their assessment, intervention and consultation skills in multidisciplinary primary care settings. 4) To provide training in bilingual counseling to CP and MSW trainees. 5) To assess patients on patient variables related to utilization of health services.

New York

D40 HP 00041870
Carmen Rivera, Ph.D.
Mental Health/Psychology Unit
Luthern Medical Center
150 55th Street
Brooklyn, New York  11220
Tel:  718-437-5218
E-mail:  crivera@Lmcmc.com

The Lutheran Family Health Center Network, as one of the nation’s largest federally qualified health centers, seeks to expand its APA-accredited Psychology Internship program into the primary care setting in a manner which sets as its goals the Healthy People 2010 goals of increasing life span and quality of life, and of elimination of health disparities.  The proposed project is aimed at increasing access to culturally competent services for the underserved, largely ethnic minority populations to the medically underserved communities in the areas served by the Lutheran Family Health Centers.  Significant disparities exist in the service area related to chronic and acute medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and HIV/AIDS as well as the psychological distress associated with these conditions which negatively impact the disease process. Behavioral health interventions can be utilized to increase compliance, improve outcomes, and help consumers live healthier lives.  The services area’s health disparities are compounded by psychosocial impediments such as stigma, the uninsured, and lack of access to services. The program proposes to develop an interdisciplinary curriculum from the fields of psychology, social work, and medicine to create a collaborative environment among professional staff and provide continuous services to consumers who might otherwise not have access. The curriculum trains psychology interns alongside social work interns, who will be working alongside medical professionals, and will include didactic and experiential components such as direct patient care, consultation, case presentation, and seminar. Interventions will include assessment, short-term individual and group psychotherapy, psycho-education, and consultation. The curriculum will increase the program completers understanding of the medical conditions facing consumers and the challenges inherent in providing community-based medical services as well as educating medical staff about behavioral health symptoms and interventions which may aid in the management of disease. The program philosophy will be guided by a sensitivity to the multicultural needs of the population served and incorporate direct service and consultative approaches. The proposed program will also create two new clinical rotations emphasizing knowledge and practice in the prevention of disease and health promotion. The program seeks to disseminate the curriculum as a model program aimed at increasing the number of psychologists and social workers choosing primary care, community-based prevention and health promotion services in underserved areas and to link psychological, social, and medical practice and education. The psychology internship has the capacity for seven pre-doctoral psychology interns, has been in existence for 19 years and has been continuously accredited by the American Psychological Association since 1994 with its current accreditation extending to 2011. A Licensed Psychologist will be recruited and retained as the Project Coordinator and will be responsible for coordinating all of the administrative and clinical activities of the program as well as providing supervision to the interns. Lutheran Family Health Center’s resources for implementing this program are vast, and are detailed within the Project narrative. Our record of support to develop and sustain culturally sensitive training and clinical programs is longstanding, and also noted in the narrative.

D40 HP 00042071
Linda Jayne Alpert-Gillis, Ph.D.
Department of Psychiatry
University of Rochester Medical Center
300 Crittenden Boulevard
Rochester, New York  14642
Tel:  585-275-3610
E-mail:  Linda_AlpertGillis@urmc.rochester.edu

The proposed Graduate Psychology Education (GPE) program will provide postdoctoral training with underserved child, adolescent, and family populations within an interdisciplinary health care environment via linkages throughout the University of Rochester Medical Center and the community. The proposed program will train two Child and Adolescent Psychology postdoctoral fellows per year for three years, six fellows total. The program will enable trainees to develop expertise in innovative models of mental health care delivery and preventive interventions for underserved youth in both community and medical center-based settings in order to achieve integrated health care approaches and increased access to care. Special emphasis will be placed on integrating mental health care into pediatric primary care settings, as well as implementing public health initiatives in school settings. The GPE program will eliminate barriers to care and health disparities by: 1) training fellows in new models of care delivery to serve diverse, medically underserved populations of children, adolescents, and their families, and prepare fellows for careers with these populations; and 2) increasing the number of underrepresented minority/disadvantaged psychologists in this field, supporting their program completion, and facilitating their transition to the workforce serving medically underserved communities. The program will enhance our current GPE program and build upon the strengths of our other training programs by providing training opportunities with underserved populations for psychology, pediatric, nursing, and child psychiatry trainees.

Mental health, psychosocial problems and risk-taking behaviors, many of which are preventable, currently cause more morbidity and mortality in the child and adolescent population than physical diseases and disorders. National data indicate that mental health problems now affect 1 in 4 children in the U.S., and that there is a paucity of providers currently available to address this need. Healthy People 2010 highlights the need to improve mental health and ensure access to appropriate quality mental health services.

The training model is based on the adult learning and training literatures which delineate three learning outcomes:  knowledge, efficacy/attitudes, and skill.  The training objectives will be met through three modalities: didactic seminars; practica involving direct service, consultation, and program development in linkages with community-based and URMC-based programs and settings; and scholarly projects.  The project evaluation meets two interrelated purposes: 1) to provide data internal to the program to insure its quality and satisfactory trainee progress; and 2) to provide HRSA data on the project’s outcomes and impact.  The evaluation plan ties explicitly to the project rationale, objectives, and HRSA’s CPMS indicators.  The evaluation has three primary components: Evaluation of Trainees, Faculty, and Program.

The program evaluation is designed to provide formative data, primary and secondary outcome data, summative outcome data, project impact data, and to facilitate continuous quality improvement.

North Carolina

D40 HP 00041981
Susan Phillips Keane, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
P.O. Box 26170
Greensboro, North Carolina  27402
Tel:  336-256-0017
E-mail:  spkeane@uncg.edu

This project aims to address the growing need for culturally competent mental health care professionals working with underserved populations. The underserved populations targeted by this project include children birth to five years of age, economically disadvantaged children and families, and aging adults. Services to each of these groups will be provided within the framework of cultural competence and the interface of health and mental health care through collaboration with local community agencies and health care providers. This project has specific goals for service provision within each of the targeted populations. Infants are disproportionately represented in the national welfare system and early screening, prevention, and intervention services for these children can have a significant impact on the costs of later academic and behavioral problems. Children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds frequently do not receive the mental health services they need; this too may lead to increases in both academic and behavioral difficulties. With a growing elderly population nation-wide, it is imperative that the number of service providers trained to offer care in illnesses such as dementia, Alzheimers, and depression related to declining health and loss of functioning also increases. This project will provide service to these three populations in addition to closing the gap between physical and mental health care, thus helping consumers access more necessary health services. In addition to addressing immediate community needs through the provision of these services, this project also seeks to enhance the scope of training for graduate students in clinical psychology as well as train students who are committed to providing services in underserved populations upon program completion. Students will receive training in issues related to working with the target populations of the project through five seminar series on: 1) early intervention needs; 2) working with economically disadvantaged children; 3) the interface of health and mental health; 4) geriatric training; and 5) psychotropic medication training. These seminar series will be supplemented with workshops and presentations designed to scaffold training in such a way as to provide advanced students with necessary tools to engage in practica experiences, while also exposing younger students to a Systems of Care approach to service provision and increasing awareness and appreciation for cultural differences among all students. This scaffolding approach to training across the three years of funding will ensure that training opportunities reach all 35 current trainees, as well as 18 new students (6 per each year of the project). Project goals and strategies will be shared on both local and national levels in order to increase awareness of barriers to service experienced by the target populations and provide a model for training and service provision in other communities.

Oklahoma

D40 HP 00043502
Barbara Bonner, Ph.D.
Pediatrics/CCAN/College of Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
1100 NE. 13th Street
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma  73117
Tel:  405-271-8858
E-mail:  Barbara-Bonner@ouhsc.edu

The impact of child maltreatment and trauma on children’s overall health and well-being have been well documented in the literature (Bonner, Logue, Kaufman, & Niec, 2001). The most disadvantaged and underserved groups such as low income families, minorities, and culturally diverse communities are at increased risk for such problems.  It is vital to increase access to care, provide integrated multidisciplinary services, and address the mental health needs of maltreated and traumatized children and their caregivers. The goal of the Interdisciplinary Training Initiative for Underserved Children (ITIUC) is to improve the health of abused or traumatized infants, children, and adolescents by increasing psychology trainees’ knowledge, skills, and competencies to work with these underserved groups of children through a discipline-specific and interdisciplinary training program. The ITIUC will accomplish the following five objectives: 1) provide integrated discipline-specific and interdisciplinary education to psychology trainees that emphasizes a multidisciplinary approach and integration of health, mental health, legal, and social services to serve maltreated and traumatized children; 2) reduce health disparities and improve access to health care services by increasing the number and diversity of trained psychologists; 3) advance the knowledge and skills, leadership, and professional development of psychology trainees to assure the quality of care and outcomes for underserved children; 4) promote the use of evidence-based treatment approaches; and 5) promote clinically relevant research to improve the outcomes for maltreated and traumatized children. Psychology students will be trained to provide culturally competent, integrated services to two groups of underserved children, victims of child maltreatment and children exposed to trauma. The ITIUC will be composed of two major components: (1) a discipline-specific component focusing on the training of psychology students in the assessment, treatment, and prevention of child maltreatment, and (2) an interdisciplinary component in which psychology students are trained with students from medicine, law, social work, dentistry, nursing, and related disciplines in the medical, social, and legal aspects of maltreatment. Psychology enrollees (N = 8) will be recruited from three APA-approved graduate psychology programs in Oklahoma (University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa) and from the APA-approved internship and Postdoctoral Fellowship programs at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. The ITIUC psychology students will receive an annual stipend, participate in the program for a minimum of one year, complete all program requirements, and receive a certificate of program completion. The program will be evaluated on an annual basis and the enrollees will be followed for a minimum of five years to assess the impact of the program.

Pennsylvania

D40 HP 00041639
Thomas J. Power, Ph.D.
Pediatrics / Child Development
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Joseph Stokes, Jr. Research Institute
3615 Civic Center Boulevard
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  19104
Tel:  215-590-7447
E-mail:  power@email.chop.edu

This project is designed to prepare trainees in psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and developmental-behavioral pediatrics for careers that will benefit medically underserved populations (MUPs), with a particular focus on children with or at risk for disabilities and chronic illnesses from racial/ethnic minority groups and low socioeconomic status. Consistent with the mission of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the project is dedicated to the preparation of leaders in providing clinical care and conducting research that is directly related to practice. The project emphasizes the preparation of professionals in the areas of cultural effectiveness and public health. Further, the project is designed to develop strategies to recruit and select trainees of underrepresented racial/ethnic minority status. Each year, five Psychology Interns will be selected for this project.

The following are the goals of the project:  (1) Improve the skills and competencies of Psychology interns and trainees in Psychiatry and Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics in providing services to underserved populations, in particular children with or at risk for disabilities and chronic illnesses from underrepresented minority groups and low socioeconomic status; (2) Improve the knowledge base of Psychology interns and trainees in Psychiatry and Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics in the areas of cultural competence, public health, ethics, and genetics; (3) Develop the infrastructure of the Psychology Training Program to prepare leaders in service integration for MUPs; and (4) Select interns in Psychology who have strong to exceptional background in the areas of diversity awareness and cultural competence.

Interns will obtain experiential training in one or more of the following community rotations: (a) Violence Prevention, (b) Behavioral Health in Schools, (c) Primary Care Intervention, (d) Adolescent HIV, (e) Starting Young (for young children in foster care), (f) Management of ADHD in Primary Care, and (g) Sickle Cell Disease Intervention. Each of these programs provides services to children with or at risk for disabilities/chronic illnesses, who reside in low-income families located in inner-city communities. Over 90% of the children served are members of racial/ethnic minority groups.

Didactic training will be provided to trainees in psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and developmental-behavioral pediatrics through a variety of interdisciplinary training forums. Multiple strategies will be used to recruit trainees who are committed to working with underserved populations in community settings, which have been highly successful in recruiting trainees from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups.

Tennessee

D40 HP 00043503
Parinda Khatri, Ph.D.
Cherokee Health Systems
2018 Western Avenue
Knoxville, Tennessee  37921
Tel:  865-544-0406
E-mail:  parinda.khatri@cherokeehealth.com

Cherokee Health Systems (CHS) a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) serving 11 counties in East Tennessee at 20 clinic sites, proposes to expand its internship training class to four from three and increase the level of multidisciplinary training for the internship program as a whole.  The overall purpose of the project is to increase the trained workforce in integrated care while improving services for underserved and disadvantaged populations in East Tennessee.  The CHS APA accredited predoctoral internship in psychology provides generalist training that prepares students for the practice of professional psychology in multidisciplinary community based settings.  The primary goal of the CHS internship is to provide an intensive and diverse clinical training experience within a community health setting.  Because CHS provides progressive and broad-based health services, interns gain exposure to a unique range of clinical training opportunities, with a primary focus on integrated primary behavioral care.  The variety of clinical experiences within a community health setting facilitates professional competency in a range of arenas, including Clinical Skills, Integrated Services Delivery, Sensitivity to Individual and Cultural Diversity in Professional Work, Ethical Standards in Clinical Practice, and Professional Development.  The additional intern will be placed in Cherokee Health System’s newest clinic in inner city Knoxville, serving a predominantly African-American community. This clinic (Center City clinic) provides medical and behavioral outpatient services to the community at large.  The Center City clinic multidisciplinary staff includes internal medicine physicians, pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, a physical therapist, family nurse practitioners, pharmacists, psychologists, and clinical social workers.  They work in unison to provided comprehensive, integrated health care to patients with complex medical, social, and mental health needs.

CHS partnered with the Knox County Health Department in early 2007 to provide primary care services to the city’s most indigent population, primarily homeless or in shelters.  The Knox County Health Department is also located in an inner city Knoxville urban area and employs a contingent of primary care providers and other medical providers and ancillary staff.  One hundred percent of the Health Department’s patients are uninsured and many are indigent or homeless.  Both the CHS and the Health Department census tracts are federally designated Medically Underserved Communities.  With the Knox County Health Department collaboration, beginning April 2007, CHS Center City clinic will provide primary care services to an additional 1500 patients.  This partnership and the ability to have an additional intern present an opportunity to expand psychology training in primary care with an underserved population.

Virginia

D40 HP 00041872
Barbara Ann Cubic, Ph.D.
Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Eastern Virginia Med ical School
825 Fairfax Avenue P.O. Box 1980
Norfolk, Virginia  23507
Tel:  757-446-5888
E-mail:  cubicba@evms.edu

Recent trends in health care combined with society’s stigmatization of mental health patients have lead to patients receiving mental health care most frequently in primary care settings. Unfortunately, on-site interdisciplinary training in dealing with behavioral issues in primary care for psychology interns or family medicine residents is rare. This remains true despite the fact that many of the main focus areas of the

GP 2010 relate to quality care access, behavioral change, mental health, and substance abuse. Numerous barriers to appropriate primary care mental health treatment exist that are related to misconceptions about mental illness and mental health treatments held by patients. Uninformed providers and the design of primary care visits (e.g. time constraints) create additional barriers. A mechanism for addressing these barriers is integrated training at the advanced level (i.e. internship, residency) that creates an understanding of each disciplines different backgrounds, values, professional models, and ideologies.

The proposed project will fund an educational model that teaches psychology interns about the subtleties of working in a primary care environment. Simultaneously the mental health education of family medicine residents will be fostered. Through minor rotations in primary care psychology, psychology interns, will complete morning rounds with residents in the inpatient setting, serve as consultants and educators for outpatient primary care practices, and receive specialized training in cultural diversity, obesity, geriatrics and child settings. Psychology interns will also receive enhanced didactics on primary care psychology topics and teach didactics to family medicine residents. The educational model also has components that are on the cutting edge of new practices seen in primary care settings as psychology interns will participate in co-leading enhanced medical visits with family physicians. Lastly, and in addition to the plan to enhance the training of psychology interns, embedded in the proposal is a plan to also expand the cultural competence of the faculty who provide training for the interns. Concurrently, the family medicine residents will develop enhanced skills at diagnosing and treating psychosocial issues within the primary care setting.

The goals of this grant coincide with the Bureau of Health Professions’ performance goals (elimination of barriers to care and health disparities) and HRSA’s desire to address key 21st century needs (training professionals to address the interrelatedness of physical and mental health). Training will occur in sites that provide services to a high percentage of medically underserved patients from an urban area (estimated at 81% African American, 2% Asian or Hispanic in the SNGH facility and 62% African American, 2% Asian or Hispanic in the GFP facility). These sites serve Health Professional Shortage Areas in primary care (Low Income Downtown Portsmouth, South Norfolk, Suffolk) and mental health (Low Income South Norfolk, Eastern Shore).

West Virginia

D40 HP 00042002
Marianna Footo-Linz, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Marshall University
One John Marshall Drive
Huntington, West Virginia  25701
Tel:  304-696-2774
E-mail:  Linz@marshall.edu

The Department of Psychology at Marshall University has developed a unique program to train doctoral level (Psy.D.) behavioral health professionals who are sensitive to, and informed about, the cultural issues involved in working with underserved rural populations. This emphasis is built upon the tradition established by our affiliated medical school, the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, which has become nationally known for successfully training primary care physicians willing to serve in rural and frontier communities. We propose the establishment of an interdisciplinary, rurally focused training program that will collaboratively integrate students in our clinical psychology doctoral program and students enrolled in the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. We anticipate that this program will have significant impact on recruitment and retention of professionals who are well prepared to meet the challenges of rural practice and who will ultimately choose to provide culturally sensitive and effective services for underserved populations. The impact of this program will be both local and national in scope and has the potential to become self sustaining in the future and also has significant potential for future expansion in terms of adding additional disciplines (such as dentistry).

Our accredited Psy.D. program emphasizes components specifically designed to heighten sensitivity to the unique milieu existing in communities that are more isolated from mainstream culture. Through a combination of coursework and supervised clinical experiences, students come to understand that these culturally distinct community systems have developed in response to the needs of the people who live there day to day and should not be simplistically viewed through a deficiency model. During their final practicum experience, students are placed in rural multidisciplinary settings and receive training with pediatric residents and medical students. During this

10 month clinical practicum, students learn to combine consultative and community oriented skills with traditional psychotherapy and assessment skills in an integrated behavioral health model which enhances their effectiveness as rural practitioners. The present proposal documents the significant needs that exist in rural and underserved regions, particularly those in central Appalachia, and describes the evidenced-based manner in which the curriculum has been designed to prepare students to practice in such areas.

 


HRSA | HHS | Privacy Policy | Disclaimers | Accessibility |
Clinician Recruitment & Service | Health Professions | Healthcare Systems | HIV/AIDS | Maternal and Child Health | Primary Health Care | Rural Health |
Instructions for Downloading Viewers and Players