Pre-Master’s Mental Health Internship – Oakland
Oakland is a bustling, diverse metropolitan city 10 miles from San Francisco, and adjacent to Berkeley. It offers the best of both worlds – the cultural opportunities of an urban environment and uniquely beautiful natural parks and open spaces. The climate is temperate with mild winters and abundant sunshine. The East Bay Regional Parks around Oakland encompass 59 parks with more than 91,000 acres for hiking, running, swimming, and other outdoor activities. Nearby Jack London Square offers fine dining and shopping and Piedmont Avenue, which is within walking distance of the medical center, also boasts numerous restaurants and stores. The city hosts a Farmer’s Market on 9th Street every Friday.
The Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center is the flagship facility of the entire Northern California Kaiser Permanente system. The Permanente Foundation opened its first hospital in Oakland in 1942. A new hospital of 346 beds was constructed in 2009, with three nearby office buildings providing outpatient services. All facilities are located in the central portion of the city and accessible by public transportation. Kaiser Oakland provides primary care to 32% of the surrounding population and tertiary care to three million health plan members in Northern California. It is a regional referral center for specialty services, such as genetics, spine surgery, pediatric neurosurgery, and transgender care.
The Psychiatry department serves a large urban and suburban community, extending from Richmond, Pinole, and Albany to the city of Alameda and San Leandro, with Oakland and Berkeley in between. Our patient population reflects the unique ethnic and cultural diversity of the region with members identifying as African American, Asian, Caucasian, Latino/a and other. Common languages spoken include Spanish, Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Our membership also includes Medicare/Medi-Cal enrollees, who comprise 11% of the population cared for in our service area. Oakland and its surrounding cities are home to one of the largest sexual and gender diverse populations in the US. Kaiser Oakland Psychiatry has been a mental health training site since the 1980s.
Program Curriculum
Equity, Inclusion & Diversity
We are committed to nurturing and integrating diversity training into all aspects of our training program by:
Providing interns with opportunities to work with patients who represent various aspects of diversity, including age, religion, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, values, and lifestyle.
Placing a high value on interns’ willingness to engage in self-reflection, and supporting the exploration of attitudes, beliefs and therapeutic postures that could impact clinical interactions.
Maintaining a consistent focus in clinical supervision on expanding interns’ multicultural awareness and competence in the provision of psychotherapeutic services and cultivating a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace.
The Regional Mental Health Training Program offers the opportunity to participate various meetings and seminars based on the number of days a trainee work per week and the meetings scheduled on those days.
Interns have access to seminars offered through the EID weekly case consultation where issues related to Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity are discussed.
Didactic Training
Interns will attend didactic seminars within their clinics and have opportunity to attend regional seminars organized by Mental Health Training Programs as their schedules permit. Didactics will cover a range of clinical and professional development topics as well as explore culturally responsive care. Interns will have access to both live and asynchronous exposure to various speakers and topics which are designed to meet their developmental needs over the course of the training year.
Seminars and Meetings
Bereavement Track
The intern would attend:
- Weekly Hospice Department staff huddle
- Monthly bereavement department case consultations
- Weekly trauma consult hour offered through MHTP (attendance encouraged)
- Opportunities to view recorded trainings from Regional MHTP’s continuing education lecture library if the intern’s workdays do not coincide with days that live training seminars are scheduled
Supervision
All interns are supervised by licensed master’s level mental health professionals who are responsible for overseeing the direct delivery of clinical services. The supervisor takes a role in developing the intern’s learning plan, monitoring their progress, and evaluating their training schedule. The supervisor is also responsible for completing the intern’s evaluation.
Bereavement Track
Weekly individual supervision
Tracks and Rotations
Bereavement
The Bereavement Department offers services to the identified bereaved (i.e. the family, friends, and caregivers) of patients who pass away while enrolled in Kaiser East Bay Hospice services. The Bereavement Department provides proactive outreach to these bereaved including offering a compassionate presence, mailing educational materials throughout the year following their loss, support groups, weekly workshops, and individual grief counseling. The Bereavement Department also offers these services to any adults in the community who are interested, regardless of insurance status. All services are free of charge.
The pre-master’s intern participates in the provision of all of these services, including co-facilitating grief support groups with a licensed clinician, presenting at a weekly grief educational workshop attended by 50+ participants, and providing individuals with short-term individual grief counseling.
The intern works with the Training Director to assess and identify individuals who are appropriate for short term grief counseling vs those who require a higher level of care and long-term therapy support.
The intern provides individual grief counselling to a maximum of five clients per week and assists in planning an annual memorial for hospice and community bereaved. The intern also assists with additional programmatic duties as appropriate/desired. The intern is encouraged to identify and implement additional grief support programs and ideas in collaboration with the Training Director.
Schedule
Bereavement
The Bereavement track is a hybrid training track in which the intern will work both in person at the local clinic and from home.
