Immigrant and Refugee Health Center – Embedded Behavioral Health CLinician in the Immigrant and Refugee Health Program (Primary Care) Practicum

Immigrant and Refugee Health Center – Embedded Behavioral Health Clinician in the Immigrant and Refugee Health Program (Primary Care)
(Clinical or Counseling Psychology; Ph.D. pr PsyD Students)  (1 position)
The practicum student placed with the IRHC will have the opportunity to practice both psychotherapy and psychological assessment through the Immigrant and Refugee Health Program (IRHP) — a specialized clinic within General Internal Medicine (GIM) at Boston Medical Center (BMC) — and a core program of BMC’s Immigrant and Refugee Health Center (IRHC).
Intervention Role (one of the practicum days will need to include Thursday afternoon):

• Complete (one of the practicum days will need to including:
  • Providing behavioral health consultation to primary care providers
  • Providing rapid diagnostics evaluation and/or brief intervention during patients’ medical appointments
    • This will include patients seen for ongoing primary care and recently arrived patients who will be seen only once or twice as part of the Refugee Health Assessment Program (RHAP)
  • Carry an individual caseload of short-term therapy patients
  • Collaborate with other GIM and IRHC team members including: primary care providers and nurses, other IRHC behavioral health providers, and the case management team — including social workers and community health workers.

Psychological Assessment Role:

The practicum student will also be conducting brief neuropsychological evaluations. Evaluations are provided to patients seeking to advance their citizenship status, who have a suspected underlying disability that has prevented them from learning English and/or mastering US civics concepts required to pass the US citizenship exam. Patients referred to this clinic have first been evaluated in primary care with a cognitive screener. Patients who are referred to our service typically have a normal cognitive screen, but the PCP suspects an underlying issue that they are unable to assess for in the primary care context (e.g., learning disability, complex psychiatric presentation). We customize the testing battery for each patient, focusing on maximizing cross-cultural validity in psychological assessment. The practicum student also works in coordination with members of our interdisciplinary team including the referring PCP, IRHC’s embedded Citizenship and Immigration Rights Navigator (CAIRN), and members of our behavioral health or neurology teams as needed. Opportunities to provide additional types of immigration-related psychological evaluations (e.g., Asylum, VAWA) are also available to the practicum student.

Additional educational opportunities:

Participation in monthly: a) clinical group supervision and b)behavioral health trainee peer consultation support groups with the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights (another program of the IRHC housed in the dept of psychiatry at BMC and specializing in caring for survivors of torture)

• Participation in interdisciplinary IRHC monthly team meetings.
• Participation in GIM and/or psychiatry grand rounds.

We look forward to welcoming the practicum student to our passionate, caring, interdisciplinary team. In order to optimize culturally and linguistically responsive clinical care, we strongly encourage applications from trainees who speak Haitian Creole, Spanish, Pashto, or Dari, and have cultural knowledge of Haitian, Latinx, or Afghan communities.

The application deadline is 1/2/24