12th Annual Meeting - New Orleans, LA
2019 Council of Clinical Health Psychology Training Programs (CCHPTP) Midwinter Meeting
- Best Practices in Competency Assessment
- January 20-21, 2019, New Orleans, LA
This meeting builds on our series of mid-winter meetings to inform clinical health psychology training programs on innovations in training related to health care reform and the blueprint for the future of health service psychology. The meeting was held at the historic Hotel Monteleone beginning Sunday morning, January 20, and concluding at noon on Monday, January 21, 2019 (Martin Luther King Holiday). www.hotelmonteleone.com
Topics of the conference include:
- The Future of Doctoral Training in Health Psychology
- Best Practices in Competency Assessment
- Post-Doctoral Competencies
- Discussion on Implementing Best Practices in Competency Assessment
Conference speakers include:
- Robert Kaplan, PhD
- Lisa Kearney, PhD, ABPP
- Jennifer Callahan, PhD, ABPP
- Jeff Goodie, PhD, ABPP
The 2019 Annual Midwinter Meeting of CCHPTP was focused on best practices in the assessment of health service psychology competencies in clinical health psychology doctoral programs, internships, and post-doctoral training. In 2009, the CCHPTP midwinter meeting was focused on competency assessment and thus, the 2019 meeting served as a 10-year update to learn about advances in the competency assessment process. Approximately 40 training directors from doctoral programs, internships and postdocs participated in a vibrant and highly informative meeting, learning from four invited presenters, and productive small work group discussions.
Day 1 - Bob Kaplan began with an interesting talk that overviewed the process of PhD training in the social, behavioral and economic sciences, challenging attendees to consider how and for what type work/settings we currently train PhD, and—given changes in recent years—what should the future curriculum of doctoral training look like. This was followed by Jennifer Callahan who reviewed her extremely relevant work on the psychometric development of assessment instruments and the process of implementing assessment procedures in doctoral training programs. Jennifer was both stimulating in her explanation of her work, but also very gracious in offering to share assessment instruments/procedures to all interested. Thanks Jennifer! Jeff Goodie then presented the details of how he, in his doctoral program at Uniformed Services University, has implemented a valuable assessment process via use of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Attendees had lots of interest and follow up questions of Jeff as many program directors began to consider how they too could use the OSCE. Our fourth invited talk was by Lisa Kearney who discussed the process of training VA psychologists in Primary Care Integration. She focused her talk on not only how training is done, but most importantly how they assess competencies of VA trainees. Her talk showed us how clinical health psychologists are intimately involved in preparing the VA to provide integrative health care services.
Day 2 - Day two began with an excellent overview of competency assessment by Cathi Grus of the APA Education Directorate—no single person has been more closely involved in the process of developing competencies and considering how best to assess them than Cathi. We were very fortunate to have her expertise with us throughout the entire 2-day conference, and her overview on the past, present and future of competency assessment facilitated our final session—small work groups. These work groups, organized by training setting, allowed time for all attendees to share notes, as further questions, compare programs and leave with practical, workable suggestions for how they could implement competency assessment processes in their local settings.
Don Nicholas CCHPTP
Board Member Program Chair
