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.
This 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 medical offices
- 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
You'll learn to perform diagnostic screenings and more comprehensive evaluations, serve as a consultant to multidisciplinary treatment teams, and provide therapy services in medical and community mental health settings.
Based at WellSpan Philhaven in York, PA, the internship 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 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
- 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 a behaviorist in an integrated team within medical settings 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
- motivational interviewing
As our interns and supervisors identify areas of need for additional training over the course of the year, we then incorporate these areas 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 in York. While seeing clients, you remain under the supervision of the doctoral-level licensed internship supervisors in York.
While seeing clients, you remain under the supervision of the doctoral-level licensed internship supervisors in York.
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 Centers (APPIC).
Internship overview
You’ll be expected to complete a 2,000-hour internship within 52 weeks. This includes 106 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 medical practices. You’ll have regularly scheduled weekly hours at each of these locations.
Our outpatient sites provide services to children, adults and geriatric patients. Services include:
- individual, group and family psychotherapy
- psychodiagnostic evaluations
- ADHD evaluations
- neuropsychological evaluations
- medical evaluations – bariatric and spine stimulator assessments
Each week, you will have a set 40-hour work week. There are no evening, weekend or on-call expectations. Crisis support is provided by the WellSpan system. All interns work from 8-4:30pm on Wednesdays and 9-4pm on Fridays. Schedules vary the other days of the week by intern but are fixed throughout the year and include one evening until 7:30pm. Interns are in medical settings 8-12 hours a week. The remainder of your time is spent in our community mental health setting.
In the medical setting, you’ll work closely with physicians and medical 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 two hours of didactic 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.
For more details:
Wendy Wild, PsyD, internship director of clinical training
(717) 851-6340 or wwild@wellspan.org.
Also see the CBT Doctoral Internship Training Manual.
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
WellSpan Philhaven also offers a Hospital Doctoral Psychology Internship program.
Date program tables were updated August 14, 2024.
