Our program offers three training tracks:
- End-of-life care, grief and bereavement
- Consultation/liaison health psychology
- Integrated primary care psychology.
Fellows receive training specific to their specialty track as well as exposure to didactic material pertinent to the alternate tracks in order to broaden their educational experience.
End-of-Life Care, Grief and Bereavement
This track is designed to train future psychologists in the relatively under-represented subspecialty of dying, death and bereavement – also called thanatology, the study of death and psychological mechanisms for coping with death.
Fellows receive a minimum of two hours per week of individual supervision and 2-3 hours per week of formal seminars that concentrate on theoretical and research-based information in six major areas:
- Dying
- End-of-life decision making
- Bereavement
- Assessment/intervention
- Traumatic death
- Death education
These educational objectives closely follow recommendations codified by the Association for Death Education and Counseling, an international and interdisciplinary professional organization devoted to promoting excellence in the care of the dying and the bereaved.
Fellows in this track work closely with the Supportive Palliative Care Team as well as Hospice, which exposes them to the full clinical spectrum of approaching death, end of life issues, acute grief at the time of death, immediate aftermath, and more extended bereavement trajectory.
Consultation/Liaison Health Psychology
This track is designed to prepare psychologists to work in a variety of health-related settings: hospitals, clinics, private psychology practice with medical specialization, and academic psychology departments.
Consultation/Liaison Health psychology provides a broad array of experiences with fellows working in both inpatient and outpatient settings to treat medical and psychiatric patients with acute and chronic needs. Patients range from mature adolescents to adults to the elderly, as well as families.
Fellows receive in-depth training opportunities encompassing assessment, psychodiagnostic evaluations, evidenced-based clinical interventions, consultation with other medical services/teams (e.g., neurology, oncology, pain center, obstetrics-gynecology, weight-reduction surgery, and transplant), and research/scholarly activity.
Integrated Primary Care Psychology
This track focuses on developing a diverse and comprehensive treatment plan to address the biological, psychological and social needs of patients in their primary care medical home. The Integrated Primary Care Psychology track at Baylor Scott & White Health operates alongside our Family Medicine Residency Program. Our goal is to develop psychologists who are competent to provide a variety of evidence-based psychological interventions in primary care because, as medicine moves from a fee-for-service model to quality-of-care models, psychologists well versed in behavioral health service delivery will be highly marketable in many health care systems.
Fellows will spend two days per week working in a primary care setting. Activities include direct patient care supervised by licensed psychologists, consultation with primary care physicians/nurses regarding comprehensive biopsychosocial care, supervision, collaborative learning in partnership with Family Medicine resident physicians, and selected opportunities for observational learning.