Internship Creation, 2:  The PCOM Center for Brief Therapy
Bruce Zahn, Ph.D.

The PCOM Center for Brief Therapy is a member of the Association of Postdoctoral and Psychology Internship Centers (APPIC) and received initial accreditation for the maximum of seven years by the Commission on Accreditation of the American Psychological Association in August, 2014. 

Bruce
                  Zahn
I decided to pursue accreditation because basically, I knew that it was the right thing to do by our students to maintain the integrity of the internship.  We put a lot of effort into the development and advancement of the internship, and if we didn't pursue accreditation, we would be short-changing our students and our academic program.  The school funds the internship so we only accept our own students in our clinical Psy.D. program.  As for starting the self-study process, I took a page right out of behavior therapy and applied it to myself.  Instead of giving in to all those negative thoughts about how onerous a task it would be, I started out by taking small actions steps that were doable:  download the self-study instructions, CHECK!  Complete the first page asking for demographic information (name, address, email address, etc.), CHECK!  Then on to the next page.  I began to gather a head of steam, as I realized that I could answer many of the questions or knew where to get the information, and before you know it, I was "all in!"  Of course, it wasn't all that easy, and took me more than a year to complete, with the assistance of a few of my colleagues, but before long, I could see that it would be doable, and I kept focusing on the right reasons for persisting, and not giving up.  In the end, we got 7 years accreditation?  Was it so much fun that I wish we could do it again in 3 years instead?  Not really! But in the end, we have tremendous pride at our accomplishment, and like most things we do, we have equal satisfaction that our students will benefit from our hard work for years to come!

PCOM Center
                      for Brief Therapy The internship is exclusively affiliated with the APA-accredited Psy.D. program in Clinical Psychology at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. It is designed to train future psychologists to work in health care settings as providers of comprehensive psychological services that stress interdisciplinary collaboration. 
   The internship fulfills part of its mission in a rotation at the on-campus Center for Brief Therapy, the outpatient clinic at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, which also accepts referrals from the Center for Academic Resources and Educational Services, a student-focused program designed to lend academic support services to medical students and graduate students who are members of the PCOM academic community. The internship fulfills another part of its mission by having interns participate in rotations with an integrated primary care emphasis at the on-campus PCOM Family Medical Practice and/or at community health care centers in three urban sites: the PCOM Roxborough Health Care Center, the Lancaster Avenue Health Care Center in West Philadelphia, and the Cambria Health Care Center in North Philadelphia. In each of these centers, interns collaborate with medical and allied mental health professionals as a fully participatory member of the total health care team.  In addition, the internship continues to extend supervised clinical training experiences in the arena of integrated behavioral health.