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H. Therapy and Assessment Practica

Faculty

A supervision contact hour is defined as one hour of contact between a supervisor and his or her supervisees or class. The optimum range for enrollment in a therapy practicum is five to six students, although occasionally practicum sections run at four students.

Students

The section uses a team approach to practicum training under PSY 7920 (Clinical Practicum). Students must complete a minimum of 4 semesters (12 credit hours) of PSY 7920. Students are assigned to treatment teams for practicum training by the Director of Clinical Training and the Director of the Psychology Clinic in consultation with the PSY 7920 practicum supervisors. Although it may not be possible every semester, the section attempts to have at least one child and one adult supervisor assigned to practicum each semester and, to the extent possible based on the kinds of client referrals to the training clinic, attempts to accommodate the training needs of those pursuing elective training in clinical child.

All practicum assignments are through the department鈥檚 Training Clinic. Faculty supervise all cases, planning appropriate assessment and therapy experience for students based on client needs and clinical requirements. Students and supervisors should follow the Policies and Procedures manual for the Training Clinic when providing clinical services there.

When students apply for internship, they need to provide potential internship sites with information about their practicum and traineeship experiences. The Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC)-member internship programs use the AAPI form, which is linked to Time2Track for documenting clinical experiences. Students are required to maintain a record of their clinical hours by utilizing the Time2Track program available to students through the training clinic. The Clinic Director reviews the Time2Track data on a regular basis, and students include Time2Track summaries at each annual evaluation for the Section to review. At present, the department pays for students鈥 Time2Track subscriptions up until they leave for internship.

The following are some general guidelines based on suggestions developed by the APPIC that students might find helpful. In addition, there is a detailed Powerpoint that is reviewed with students during their orientation to the clinic and that is available for students on the Clinical Student鈥檚 Team channel for easy review.

  1. A practicum hour is a clock hour. This may actually be a 45 to 50-minute client hour, but is calculated by actual hours, not semester hours nor number of hours per week multiplied by number of weeks in the term.
  2. Direct services are actual clock hours in direct service to clients. Direct services include:
    1. direct intervention with clients, subdivided by format of intervention (e.g., individual, family, group) and setting location (e.g., department clinic, hospital, school);
    2. assessment activity subdivided into formal psychometric and interview/observation/diagnostic techniques; and
    3. other psychological experiences with students and/or organizations, which includes
      1. Supervised supervision that students render to less advanced students in the context of learning supervision skills.
      2. Program development/outreach programming
      3. Outcome assessment of projects or programs
      4. Systems intervention/organizational consultation/performance improvement
      5. Other activities (e.g., prevention)
  3. Time spent about the client, but not in the actual presence of the client, is recorded as Support Activities. Quantifiable activities documented under support activities include:
    1. Case conferences
    2. Case management; consultation with other professionals on specific cases
    3. Didactic training, seminars, grand rounds
    4. Progress notes, clinical writing, chart review
    5. Assessment scoring/interpretation and report writing; and
    6. videotape and audiotape review
  4. Practicum hours must be supervised. The supervision that students receive may be broken down into one-to-one and group supervision.
    1. One-to-one supervision hours are regularly scheduled, face-to-face individual supervision with the specific intent of dealing with psychological services that students render.
    2. The hours recorded in the group supervision category should be actual hours of group focus on specific cases. If a practicum course incorporates both didactic and experiential components in the course activity, the didactic portion should not be recorded as supervision activity. This may necessitate breaking the hours spent in a practicum course into supervision and didactic activities by actual clock hours. APPIC offers the following examples to clarify recording of such activity: 鈥淔or example, if I present on the 鈥楶sychosocial Issues of HIV Infection鈥 using examples of cases, it is didactic activity. However, if I present a specific case involving HIV infection and generate a case conference/group supervision response, it would be recorded in supervision. Likewise, Grand Rounds that consists of in-service education on specific topics would not be considered supervision for the purposes of documenting practicum hours.鈥
  5. Students also need to calculate the number of clients assessed and treated across a range of client diversity characteristics, including race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, and gender. Note that these categories are not mutually exclusive; some individuals will be counted in more than one category. For families, couples or groups, students should count each individual member as a separate client, even though the clinical service itself can only be counted once.

Additional Pointers

  1. Assessment and intervention hours refer to direct contact with clients/patients. Practice administrations of assessments or interventions to colleagues, fellow students, or practice clients (i.e., pseudoclients) do not count towards contact hours.
  2. When calculating assessment experience, students include number of assessments that they administered and scored as well as the number for which they wrote an integrated report.
  3. The calculation of assessment experience also includes the writing of integrated reports. In order to count as an integrated report, APPIC requires the following assessment information to be present in the report: 1) client history; 2) clinical interview; and 3) at least two tests from one or more of the following categories: Personality assessments (objective, self-report, and/or projective), Intellectual assessments, Cognitive assessments, and/or Neuropsychological assessments. As noted by APPIC, this 鈥渋nformation is synthesized into a comprehensive report providing an overall picture of the patient/client.鈥 Triage/intake evaluations in the clinic can count as integrated assessment reports if both cognitive screening (such as WASI-II) and personality assessment instruments are given in addition to the history and interview. For child psychoeducational evaluations, achievement tests are cognitive in nature and thus an evaluation involving parent and/or child interviews, multidimensional rating scales, intelligence tests, and achievement tests are integrative in nature. To gain additional assessment and integrated report writing experience, students can complete Advanced Practicum (7925), which involves more complex psychological, psychoeducational, and neuropsychological assessments for adult cases presenting to the training clinic. Child practica typically involve both intake assessments and more comprehensive and integrated assessments and reports.