Behavioral Health Clinical Psychology Internship Program

For those wishing to further their education in clinical psychology, WellSpan Philhaven offers an APA-accredited* Doctoral Internship Program in Clinical Psychology. For more information, please contact Wendy Wild, Psy.D., internship director of clinical training, at (717) 851-6340 or wwild@wellspan.org.

• CBT Doctoral Internship Training Manual

WellSpan Philhaven also offers a Hospital Doctoral Psychology Internship program. Visit that program's site to learn more.

WellSpan Philhaven CBT Doctoral Internship

The doctoral internship at WellSpan Philhaven CBT is designed to train future psychologists to work in health care settings, especially large, integrated health systems such as ours, as providers of comprehensive psychological services with an emphasis on multidisciplinary collaboration. Accordingly, we are aggressively recruiting a diverse group of interns with a passion for learning CBT and integrating these skills into medical settings and to performing diagnostic screenings and more comprehensive evaluations, serving as consultants to multidisciplinary treatment teams, and providing staff trainings in areas such as motivational interviewing. Also, we seek interns who are capable of a close reading of the relevant research literature and of presenting this clearly and succinctly to a professional audience in the true tradition of the practitioner-scholar model. WellSpan Philhaven offers a full spectrum of psychological services to virtually all diagnostic categories and all ages in inpatient, crisis intervention, intensive outpatient, outpatient, and medical-surgical settings. The internship has a strong cognitive behavioral orientation aimed to address the physical and emotional health of the population. Interns participate in this effort by spending their time divided into three main tasks: addressing population health by serving as a behaviorist in primary care, honing their assessment and therapy skills in traditional outpatient settings, and training to extend proficiency in cognitive behavioral psychotherapy with an emphasis in behavioral medicine and community behavioral health.

A Commitment to Training

WellSpan Philhaven CBT strives to provide a planned, sequential training program that contributes to ongoing excellence in the field of psychology and is committed to the following core values:

• We are committed to the practitioner-scholar model with training based upon applying sound scientific knowledge and scholarly practice to clinical work.
• We are committed to a broad range of skill development encompassing a variety of skill sets that practitioner-scholars have found useful. We seek to provide experiences aimed at producing well-rounded clinicians with the skills to function in a variety of settings including clinical service, integrated care, community consultation, and education.
• We are committed to an understanding of human diversity as it affects the delivery of clinical services to diverse client groups. Training includes the opportunity to work with clients from various ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups.
• We are committed to the facilitation of the development of professional identity and ethical professional practice. Training offers the opportunity to engage in a variety of professional roles and to do so with the expectation of a high level of professionalism and ethical standards.
• We are committed to extending interns’ knowledge and skills in cognitive behavioral therapy with an emphasis in behavioral medicine to address population health. In line with this aim, experience serving as both a generalist in an outpatient setting and a behaviorist in an integrated team within primary care is central to our training.

A defining emphasis of the internship is extending proficiency in cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Training Seminar offered weekly forms the spine of the didactic training. The curriculum is designed to teach proficiency in cognitive behavioral therapy. The training relies heavily on role play and review of videotaped sessions to achieve mastery of core skills. The didactic training seminar series focuses on a broad array of professional issues including

As areas of need for additional training are identified over the course of the year by the interns and supervisors, they are incorporated into the curriculum.

Interns are given the opportunity to lead a discussion of a research based topic within the seminar to foster professional development and growth. Virtually all the internship training experiences, including supervision and didactic seminars, occur on site at WellSpan Philhaven. While seeing clients, the interns remain under the supervision of the doctoral level, licensed internship supervisors at WellSpan Philhaven.

Our doctoral internship training program is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of the American Psychological Association and is a member of the Association of Psychology Post-doctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC).Interns are expected to complete a 2,000-hour internship within 52 weeks. This includes 96 hours PTO and 6 paid holidays over the course of the internship. Interns will spend their time split between an outpatient clinic and their assignment at one of our primary care practices. Interns will have regularly scheduled hours at each of these locations. Our outpatient sites provide services to children, adults, and geriatric patients. Services include individual, group, and family psychotherapy, forensic services and neuropsychological evaluations. Interns are expected to work six evening hours (5p.m. and after) each week. Interns schedule approximately 25 outpatient hours at the Meadowlands to hit the target of 20 patient hours per week. In their primary care setting, interns work closely with primary care physicians and psychiatric staff to collaborate on assessment and treatment utilizing the bio-psycho-social model of assessment and treatment.

Interns attend individual, face-to-face supervision with at least two different doctoral level licensed psychologists on our staff for a combined two hours each week, two hours of group supervision with a licensed doctoral level staff psychologist, and attend didactic intern seminars with the intern cohort. Other supervised training experiences such as case conferences, multidisciplinary team meetings, educational seminars and Grand Rounds may occur. At a minimum, four hours per week of supervision and two hours per week of didactic training are provided.

Our internship site agrees to abide by the APPIC policy that no person at this training facility will solicit, accept, or use any ranking-related information from any intern applicant.

* Questions related to the program’s accredited status should be directed to the Commission on Accreditation:

Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation
American Psychological Association
750 1st Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
Phone: (202) 336-5979
E-mail: apaaccred@apa.org

Internship Admissions, Support, and Initial Placement Data

Date Program Tables are updated: 7/3/2023