Training Experiences

Fellowship programs at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler are based on the Practitioner-Scholar model and postdoctoral fellows are trained to become proficient consumers of research who utilize scholarly inquiry to inform their practice.

Clinical Health and Clinical Psychology

Experiences for Clinical Health and Clinical Psychology include conducting inpatient and outpatient consultations for reasons including comorbidity of medical illness and psychological conditions, issues with adherence to treatment, pre-existing psychological illness and suicide risk assessments.

The consultation liaison experience also emphasizes collaboration with medical teams, staff and patient families. Fellows will be integrated into the In-Patient Consultation Liaison team at the University of Texas Tyler Medical center. Each Fellow will attend and participate in daily rounds. (Each Fellow will have a two day a week afternoon rotation 1400 – 1630).  In patient experience will include comorbidity of medical illness and psychological conditions, issues with adherence to treatment, pre-existing psychological illness, and suicide risk assessments. Fellows will have the opportunity to work in close collaboration with a multitude of disciplines in the hospital setting.

Experiences also include health psychology and neuropsychological evaluations such as pain/opioid and pre-surgical evaluations, diagnostic clarification evaluations, cognitive/behavioral evaluations and dementia assessments. Additionally, fellows will provide psychological care using evidence-based interventions for mental health and behavioral health issues including but not limited to depression, anxiety, PTSD, smoking cessation, weight management and pain management. Training experiences will take place across the UT Health system, which includes several hospitals (medical and psychiatric); outpatient clinics including family medicine, oncology, palliative care and emergency departments.

Fellows will have the opportunity to work within the University of Texas at Tyler.  Two areas of clinical emphasis will be offered.

  1. Fellows will have experiences in Sports Medicine working with athletes to optimize their performance from an integrated health perspective working closely with the sports medicine physicians, athletic trainers, strength and lifting trainers, and coaching staff.  Further, Fellows will be integral in helping student athletes cope with physical and mental health challenges inherent to competitive sports and unique to student athletes including motivation, cognitive distortions that impact performance, stress management, environmental challenges including coach and team dynamics and conflict, identity challenges, and return to play situations resulting from injuries requiring extensive physical therapy compliance, season ending, and/or possible career ending injuries.

Fellows will be integrated into the University of Tyler Student Counseling center. They will assist students with a range of psychiatric presentations including anxiety, depression, first episode psychosis, crisis situations and suicidal ideation/attempts, relationship and interpersonal conflict, academic pressures, expectations, and stress, and other normative areas of adjustment to college life. This may also include gender identity issues, substance use, psychodiagnostics, and possibly basic cognitive assessments to assist student in obtaining appropriate accommodations and academic support.

Supervision & Didactics

  • Fellows will receive a minimum of two hours per week of individual supervision from faculty who are licensed psychologists. Additional supervision is available if requested.
  • Fellows will have the opportunity to mentor and provide supervision to doctoral psychology interns, participate in didactics with family medicine and psychiatry residents and present didactic lectures during the academic year.
  • Research and scholarly activity opportunities are available in all fellowship programs.

 

For more information, please see the program handbook.