Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center
Psychology Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Requirements for Completion
The Training Year
The training year is defined as 52 weeks, from August 16th, 2021 to Friday, August 12th, 2022. Federal holidays (10 workdays), absences due to annual leave (13 workdays), sick leave (13 workdays) and research days (5 workdays) are included in those 52 weeks. For time accounting purposes, leave and other absences are assumed to be idiosyncratically distributed throughout the training year and are included in/counted as part of the duration of the rotation in which they occur. Fellows should use planned absences judiciously and are not allowed to curtail their training year by ‘saving’ leave days in order to finish the fellowship in less than the 52-week time span allotted. Leaves should be planned to minimize absences during mandatory training experiences. There is no reimbursement for Annual or Sick Leave not used by the year’s end. A “Certificate of Postdoctoral Fellowship” is issued upon successful completion of the program. "Graduation” occurs in late August, and must be attended by the fellow.
Training Aims
It is expected that, upon completion of the program, all fellows will demonstrate competence in the following general areas. The minimum level of achievement required to demonstrate competency is obtaining a score of 7 or higher on all competencies by the end of the training year.
Competencies
This category may include, but is not necessarily limited to, the following skills:
- Integration of science and practice
- Ethical and legal standards
- Individual differences and cultural diversity
- Professional values and attitudes
- Communitcation and interpersonal skills
- Assessment
- Intervention
- Supervision
- Consultation and interprofessional/interdiscplinary skills
- Patient centered practices.
Evaluation of Training Outcomes, Processes and Resources
The fellow receives an evaluation in combined checklist/narrative form from his/her supervisor, addressing the fellow’s performance in relation to the program’s training objectives. The rotation evaluations serve both as a method of performance feedback and as a measure and documentation of training outcomes, i.e., the degree to which training objectives have been met. These evaluations of the fellow’s clinical rotation performance (i.e., demonstrated knowledge and skill) rate the fellow in terms of competence and professional attributes. The rotation evaluations are a component of the program’s “outcome evaluation” efforts.
The fellow similarly completes an evaluation of the supervision received at the end of each rotation. The supervisor and the fellow are expected to exchange their evaluations of one another, to discuss and sign them and to forward them to the Director of Training for review and concurrence. Evaluations of supervisors are part of the program’s efforts at “resource evaluation” as well as “process evaluation.”
A global assessment of the fellowship program, in combined structured and narrative form, is solicited from the fellow at the year's end, as another part of the program's systematic efforts at self-evaluation. The year-end evaluation contains both “process evaluation” and “resource evaluation” components. Information gleaned from the various evaluations is reviewed, analyzed and utilized to make adjustments in the training program.
