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Introduction Hennepin County Medical Center is the centerpiece of Hennepin County’s clinical health services, which include the HMO Metropolitan Health Plan, the physician group practice Hennepin Faculty Associates, and its network of community clinics. The medical center offers a full spectrum of inpatient and outpatient services, and a number of regional centers, including the Center for Diabetes and Endocrinology, Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, Comprehensive Cancer Center, Knapp Rehabilitation Center, the Center for Senior Care and the Perinatal Center. HCMC serves a culturally, ethnically, and economically diverse population from urban, suburban, and rural areas. Interpreter services are available for 61 languages. In 2006, the hospital had 22,062 admissions, 306,474 clinic visits, 102,052 Emergency Department visits (includes Urgent Care), 11,082 Acute Psychiatric Services visits, and 121,476 interpreter services contacts. HCMC
has a long distinguished history of providing graduate education to physicians,
psychologists, and other health professionals. Its mission
statement is: "Hennepin County Medical Center is a public teaching hospital that provides outstanding health care services in an environment which promotes excellence in education and research." The teaching and research activities of the staff and trainees are en-hanced by the support of the Thomas Lowry Health Sciences Library.
The psychology staff at HCMC is part of the Department of Psychiatry, which is composed of an 86-bed adult inpatient service, the Partial Hospitalization Program, the Day Treatment Program, Acute Psychiatric Services, the Child Adolescent Psychiatry Service, and the large (25,000 visits per year) Adult Psychiatry Clinic operated by Hennepin Faculty Associates. The department also has an active Consultation Liaison Service, which provides extensive psychiatric and psychological consultation to adult and pediatric patients throughout the medical center. In addition to the Psychology Training Program, the Department of Psychiatry has been involved in graduate medical education of University of Minnesota medical students and residents for decades. In 1996, the Hennepin-Regions Psychiatry Residency Program was established. Currently, there are 23 residents in the program. The number of graduated resident classes stands at nine.
The APA-accredited, pre-doctoral Psychology Internship Program at HCMC offers both an Adult and a Child track. However, since the goal is to train well-rounded, general clinical psychologists, all interns are expected to do some work with both adult and child patients. We offer four internship positions usually distributed with two interns in each track, or three adult- and one child-track interns. Only students from APA-accredited graduate programs are accepted. Preference is given to applicants from graduate programs in clinical and school psychology. Graduate students from counseling programs, with an interest in pursuing more clinical training,will be considered, also. These are one year, full-time positions with the expectation of 2000 training hours. The internship year begins two weeks before Labor Day (usually the last two weeks of August) with two weeks of orientation. The stipend for the 2007/2008 training year is $22,693. Benefits include health insurance, professional development time, vacation and sick time, as well as paid holidays, and library privileges. The main goal of the internship program at HCMC is to prepare interns in the theories and techniques of assessment, intervention, and consultation necessary for an entry-level professional psychology position. The predominant approach to training is that of an apprenticeship in which the training faculty models clinical skills, professional attitudes, and ethical standards. Experiential learning is emphasized. Over the course of the training year, interns are expected to perform in a progressively more independent manner. Didactic teaching is an integral part of the training and, in accordance with our mission statement, the practice of psychology is guided by the theoretical and empirical knowledge base of the discipline. The internship program adheres to the local clinical scientist model of training. Interns are evaluated on a quarterly basis by their supervisors for that quarter. In addition, they complete a self-rating and feedback form. All completed forms are reviewed with the primary supervisor each quarter to monitor progress and forwarded to the Training Director of their Graduate Programs. If by the end of the training year, an intern has not achieved an expected competency, he or she may be required to extend the internship year (without pay) until the expected competency has been achieved. The program is supportive of interns pursuing research and scholarly interests during the internship year. Four hours per week may be designated for such endeavors. Scholarly and research activities may occur on or off site. Many past interns have utilized the allotted time for dissertation related tasks. A brief proposal for the use of this time must be approved by the primary supervisor and training director. In past years many interns have opted to apply for an additional year of fellowship training. HCMC has two full-time fellowship positions, sometimes divided among several applicants. The fellowship is not a formal, APA-accredited program; however, it provides fellows the opportunity to accumulate supervised training to help meet licensure requirements if post Ph.D. or to augment clinical skills while completing their dissertations.
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