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!
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.