Current Clinical/Counseling PhD Students and COVID

[poster348348957]

---

Members do not see this ad.

Hi all, I'm currently in a clinical/counseling phd and as our program has been navigating the transition to teletherapy, I've been wondering how other programs/externships are handling it and if there are any commonalities among programs in the way they are implementing virtual therapy. I think my program needs to be more inclusive in the patients and students they allow to engage in teletherapy so wondering if that is the case in other programs as well.

So if you don't mind sharing, would you mind posting:

1. What year you are in the program? and if comfortable, what state your program is in (since there can be different state regulations).
2. Are you a student therapist at your university clinic? community clinic? externship site? etc.
3. Are you able to do teletherapy with your patients?
4. Are you able to do new intakes virtually?
5. What does your child/adolescent work look like now?
6. Have there been any new rules about who can/cannot be seen and/or which students can/cannot provide teletherapy? (i.e. not seeing children under 12, 1st and 2nd years not allowed to do teletherapy, etc.)

Thanks so much!!

 

[R. Matey]

Sure.

1. I'm on internship.
2. At a UCC
3. Yep
4. Yep
5. Not doing it.
6. There were initial fears from staff that interns couldn't do tele-health because of APA/APPIC accreditation, but that was assuaged very quickly. The transition has been pretty seamless otherwise.

 

[jdawg2017]

1. third year, large metropolitan city on East Coast
2. VA hospital (also back at my program's community clinic now b/c of COVID and issues accessing VA materials off site)
3. Yes (CBT with community clinic patients; was doing neuropsych at VA, but that isn't happening at the moment for me... maybe again soon if I can get remote access?)
4. Yes (for community clinic and VA once I have access to VA)
5. n/a - I do not see children or adolescents
6. No

 

[beginner2011]

1. What year you are in the program? and if comfortable, what state your program is in (since there can be different state regulations).
On internship
2. Are you a student therapist at your university clinic? community clinic? externship site? etc.
VA
3. Are you able to do teletherapy with your patients?
Yes.
4. Are you able to do new intakes virtually?
Yes.
5. What does your child/adolescent work look like now?
N/A
6. Have there been any new rules about who can/cannot be seen and/or which students can/cannot provide teletherapy? (i.e. not seeing children under 12, 1st and 2nd years not allowed to do teletherapy, etc.)
My site has been extremely thoughtful about the factors that need to be considered by trainees transitioning to providing telehealth from home; e.g., the provision of planned and ad-hoc supervision, protocol to be followed in the case of emergency, other general elements such as what phone # do pts call if need to reschedule or the internet connection is lost during session. It took leadership several weeks to iron out the expectations and facilitate important conversations with supervisors and trainees. I would imagine that it will be/has been a HUGE lift for DCTs to manage all these elements for departmental clinics and disparate externship sites for trainees at very different levels of clinical and professional competence. I would really encourage trainees to practice patience with supervisors and leadership during all this. It's hard for us to see all the balls that these folks have to keep their eye on to protect patients, individual licenses, the training programs, and also trainees.

 

[forensic13]

1. What year you are in the program? and if comfortable, what state your program is in (since there can be different state regulations).
On internship on the West Coast
2. Are you a student therapist at your university clinic? community clinic? externship site? etc.
State hospital
3. Are you able to do teletherapy with your patients?
No, all of our patient contact is in person still
4. Are you able to do new intakes virtually?
No
5. What does your child/adolescent work look like now?
N/A- all adults
6. Have there been any new rules about who can/cannot be seen and/or which students can/cannot provide teletherapy? (i.e. not seeing children under 12, 1st and 2nd years not allowed to do teletherapy, etc.)
Nope, we have new rules allowing telecommuting for progress notes/report writing and regulations about masks and social distancing, but everything else is pretty much the same.

 

[EmotRegulation]

I'm a faculty member and clinic director of our in-house training clinic, so I can tell you that there is a lot of variety in how people are navigating the switch to teletherapy. The clinic director's listserv has been *very* active in the last six weeks! Some clinics closed, but most are doing telepsych. Most were initially only seeing existing cases, and now many are transitioning to doing intakes and taking new cases. There hasn't been much discussion about *clients* appropriate for telepsych on the listserv, but there certainly has been discussion about *trainees* in terms of whether it is appropriate to start new clinicians out with telepsych. I can also attest that there continues to be a lot of variety across training clinics in terms of what people are doing and how they do it--as it pretty common for basically every training clinic question you could ask.