A.F Williams Family Medicine Center

A.F. Williams Family Medicine Center is a primary training site for Family Medicine residents as well as clinical pharmacy students, nurse practitioner students, physician assistant students, psychology graduate students, and medical students. Our multidisciplinary team also includes care managers, a social worker, and tele-psychiatry consultants. This provides numerous opportunities for psychology interns to work collaboratively on a multidisciplinary team.

The overarching goal of the primary care psychology major rotation is to train psychologists to provide a full range of clinical primary care psychology services as key members of multi-disciplinary healthcare teams, develop an array of interprofessional competencies, and become leaders in this growing area of healthcare. Specific goals include developing core competencies of primary care psychology such as providing consultations to patients and providers, participating in multidisciplinary care teams, providing brief individual therapy services, becoming skilled with warm hand offs and co-consultations, providing diagnostic clarification and brief assessment, providing in-patient consultation, providing group interventions, and assisting with population-based care initiatives. As a unique aspect of the primary care psychology training experience, interns will participate in many facets of medical student and resident education. We provide many opportunities for interns to become familiar with the varied roles that psychologists can have in medical education and will participate in the training of physicians in communications skills at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Interns will engage in the provision of primary care psychology services in collaboration with attending psychologists, family physicians, psychiatrists, care managers, psychiatric nurse practitioners, physician assistants, RN’s, MAs, social workers, medical students, residents, graduate psychology students, and pharmacy students. These services may include:

1. Consultation regarding behavioral health questions and presenting problems 
2. Consulting with physicians about patient care, mental health and health behavior change
3. Provision of team based care
4. Teaching and supporting patient self-management skills
5. Facilitation of health-related support groups
6. Individual patient assessment and intervention
7. Health promotion/disease prevention interventions
8. Psychological screening and assessments
9. Home Visits with a multidisciplinary team
10. Opportunities to supervise psychology practicum students and engage in supervision of supervision

Interns will contribute to the education and training of medical students and medical residents via:

1. Collaborative care/clinical teaching
2. Small group teaching
3. Coaching physicians in techniques of health behavior change
4. Video recording of clinic visits
5. Medical precepting (supervision of psychosocial aspects of medical care)
6. Hospital rounds

Interns may potentially participate in ongoing research and/or program development in community based medicine with options including:

1. Serving on grant writing teams
2. Participation in clinical home visits
3. Participation in practice based research working groups
4. Focal study of a selected underserved population

Interns will master a primary care psychology curriculum through:

1. Direct patient care in the primary care setting
2. Selected readings
3. Attending lecture and seminar series
4. Participation in medical school education activities, including Family Medicine, Rural Health and Psychiatry Grand Rounds
5. Participation in daily supervision

Interns will work collaboratively with family medicine residents and attending providers within a consultation-liaison structure to best care for patients during in-patient hospitalizations. In particular, services such as mental health screening, brief mental health interventions, health behavior change interventions, family meetings, and discharge plans are engaged effectively in this team format. Interns will observe these interactions, act independently, and receive supervision during this learning experience. Inpatient experiences are typically ½ day per week.

The rotation supervisors are well versed in evidence-based approaches to interventions in primary care, medical specialty, and traditional mental health settings. Trainees can expect to gain exposure to and expertise in behavioral activation, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and health behavior change assessment and intervention.

Our patient population includes insured and underinsured patients from a large variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. It also includes refugees from Africa, Iraq, Iran, Russia and South East Asia, medical students, residents, and medical school faculty.

The intern will receive a minimum of 2 hours of supervision per week.  Some of this supervision is individual and some will be completed as part of a precepting model where you will have the opportunity to work with supervisors with patients individually and learn from how they work and then discuss approaches to best serve those patients before and after encounters.