Philosophical Statement

Philosophically, our training model derives its foundation from the Scientist-Practitioner model described almost two decades ago by Belar and Perry. Braided into the model are educational and clinical experiences supporting professional development in pediatric psychology as articulated by Spirito and colleagues. Pediatric psychology is a subspecialty of clinical child psychology described as “an interdisciplinary field addressing physical, cognitive, social and emotional functioning and development as related to health and illness issues in children, adolescents and their families.” Thus, in addition to providing training in traditional clinical psychology, we also develop the skills necessary to “provide professional psychological services within primary care pediatric settings and tertiary health science centers that serve children and adolescents with health-related problems and chronic disease.”

Consistent with the Scientist-Practitioner model, we emphasize four major training components: a professional practice/experiential component, a scientific experiential component; a didactic scientific component; a didactic practice component. The professional practice/experiential component is the primary focus of the Internship. Although we are contained within a children’s hospital, we provide broad-based training within child clinical and pediatric psychology. Interns are exposed to a diverse patient population and gain experience in case formulation, intervention, evaluation, and consultation. We strive to make supervision dynamic in that interns and faculty actively exchange ideas as they integrate research and practice. Critical thinking and hypothesis formulation and testing are essential ingredients of the supervision experience. Also in supervision, trainees examine individual patient characteristics, family issues and begin to develop a multicultural perspective to assessment and intervention.

The scientific experiential component focuses on “learning by doing, participating and contributing to knowledge.” All interns complete their dissertation proposals and typically, four of six interns successfully defend their dissertations prior to entering the training year. If not completed prior to beginning internship, trainings are supported to actively complete their dissertations during their internship. We have liberal financial and leave time policies for interns who present at national conferences. Last year, all interns were supported to attend the Child Health Psychology Conference.

In terms of reaching our goals for the ‘didactic scientific and practice components,’ a sufficient knowledge base regarding assessment and intervention must be developed. The program provides several didactic seminars aimed at establishing a consistent foundation of evaluation, consultation and intervention “knowledge” (e.g. Assessment, Family Therapy, Pediatric Psychology Seminars). Also, from the inception of the training year, there is a focus on the integration of scientific methods and clinical practice so that interns research medical and psychological issues prior to beginning supervision, a consultation or a psychological evaluation. Interns formulate empirically supported case conceptualizations and link these conceptualizations to treatment plans. While we anticipate that interns arrive with a solid foundation of these skills, typically there are considerable differences across competencies, between interns. We place particular focus on meeting each intern at their “place in their development” to allow each trainee to develop a confident, solid foundation “to systematically apply knowledge from scientific domains to practice.”