If you have a passion for learning cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and integrating these skills into medical settings, our program may be right for you. We offer an American Psychological Association (APA)-accredited doctoral internship program in clinical psychology.
Through our internship program, you’ll learn to perform diagnostic screenings and more comprehensive evaluations, serve as a consultant to multidisciplinary treatment teams and provide staff training in areas such as motivational interviewing.
Our internship, based at WellSpan Philhaven — Mt. Gretna, focuses on preparing you to collaborate as part of an integrated care team. The program is designed to train future psychologists to work in health care settings as providers of comprehensive psychological services with an emphasis on multidisciplinary collaboration.
We’re seeking interns capable of conducting a close reading of the relevant research literature and presenting this clearly and succinctly to a professional audience in the true tradition of the practitioner-scholar model.
Our WellSpan Philhaven campus at Mt. Gretna offers a full spectrum of psychological services. We provide behavioral healthcare in multiple diagnostic categories and to all ages in inpatient, crisis intervention, intensive outpatient, outpatient and medical-surgical settings.
Our internship has a strong cognitive behavioral orientation aimed to address the physical and emotional health of the population. Your time will be divided among three main tasks:
- addressing population health by serving as a behaviorist in primary care
- honing your assessment and therapy skills in traditional outpatient settings
- training to extend proficiency in cognitive behavioral psychotherapy with an emphasis on behavioral medicine and community behavioral health
- CBT Doctoral Internship Training Manual
For more information, contact Wendy Wild, Psy.D., internship director of clinical training, at (717) 851-6340 or wwild@wellspan.org.
WellSpan Philhaven also offers a Hospital Doctoral Psychology Internship program.
Our commitment to training
Our internship is a planned, sequential training program that contributes to ongoing excellence in the field of psychology and is committed to the following core values. We’re committed to:
- the practitioner-scholar model with training based on applying sound scientific knowledge and scholarly practice to clinical work
- 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
- 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
- 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
- extending your knowledge and skills in CBT 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.
Our curriculum is designed to teach proficiency in CBT. The training relies heavily on role play and the review of recorded sessions to achieve mastery of core skills. The didactic training seminar series focuses on a broad array of professional issues, including:
- assessment techniques
- cognitive case conceptualization
- treatment planning
- empirically supported interventions for the most common disorders, including depression, anxiety disorders, trauma and personality disorders
- ethical issues in treatment
- legal/risk management
- models for psychological consultation
- health psychology
- dealing with difficult patients
- nonadherence
- motivational interviewing
As our interns and supervisors identify areas of need for additional training over the course of the year, we incorporate them into the curriculum.
You’ll be 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 — Mt. Gretna.
While seeing clients, you remain under the supervision of the doctoral-level licensed internship supervisors at WellSpan Philhaven — Mt. Gretna.
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 Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC).
Internship overview
You’ll be expected to complete a 2,000-hour internship within 52 weeks. This includes 96 hours of PTO and six paid holidays over the course of the internship.
You’ll spend your time split between an outpatient clinic and your assignment at one of our primary care practices. You’ll 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
- neuropsychological evaluations
Each week, you’ll be expected to work six evening hours (5 p.m. and after). Your schedule will include approximately 25 outpatient hours at our Meadowlands location to meet the target of 20 patient hours per week.
In the primary care setting, you’ll work closely with primary care physicians and psychiatric staff to collaborate on assessment and treatment using the biopsychosocial model of assessment and treatment.
You’ll 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. Additionally, you’ll have two hours of group supervision with a licensed doctoral-level staff psychologist and attend didactic intern seminars with the intern cohort each week.
You may have other supervised training experiences, such as case conferences, multidisciplinary team meetings, educational seminars and grand rounds. At a minimum, four hours per week of supervision and two hours per week of didactic training are provided.
Our internship abides by the APPIC policy that no person at this training facility will solicit, accept or use any ranking-related information from any intern applicant.
If you have questions about our program’s accreditation status, please contact the Commission on Accreditation:
Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation
American Psychological Association
750 1st St., NE
Washington, D.C. 20002
Phone: 202-336-5979
Email: apaaccred@apa.org
Date program tables were updated: July 3, 2023
