An internship in the Psychology Service at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven Campus provides supervised experience in a range of psychiatric, neurological, and medical settings where Psychology staff are an integral part of the clinical staff. The Healthcare System emphasizes an outpatient, primary care model of healthcare delivery with an expanding array of community-based services. The system also includes the availability of inpatient medical, surgical, psychiatric and rehabilitation services as well as tertiary care outpatient services. The hospital is fully integrated with Yale School of Medicine and staff psychologists are often members of the Medical School faculty. The Psychology Training Program maintains full APA-accreditation and APPIC membership.

Three programs are available to graduate students depending on their interests and level of training; Clinical Health Psychology, General Mental Health, and Clinical Neuropsychology. Within this framework, our basic learning model is that of a full-time clinical experience working with a wide variety of patients under close supervision in an apprenticeship model with increasing clinical responsibility over the course of the year. Our program emphasizes teaching and supervised professional experiences that promote the development of competencies necessary for the provision of high quality psychological services and research. Each clinical training setting functions in a manner consistent with a scientist-practitioner model of training that also highlights interprofessional collaboration in service provision. In essence, the student focuses upon the use of the scientist-practitioner process as a way of conceptualizing and working with patients. The basic model of teaching within our program therefore provides students with intensive professional experience working with a variety of patients and ongoing use of the published psychological literature to inform clinical work. This model similarly supports development of research skills and competencies. At year’s end, interns are expected to have satisfactorily met passing criteria in all domains and to be prepared for and competitive in obtaining either further specialized training or an entry-level position.

Competencies Expected:

By the end of internship all interns are expected to be proficient in core competencies that are fully consistent with the goals and purposes of predoctoral training of psychologists. A detailed list of these competencies is provided to students in the beginning of the training year and students are formally evaluated on several occasions. The primary core domain areas include: consultation, assessment, and intervention skills; and ability to integrate current scientific knowledge; knowledge and practice of ethics and law; professional responsibility; and sensitivity to patient diversity.