Associate Post Master’s Mental Health Fellowship – Oakland

We are committed to nurturing and integrating diversity training into every aspect of our Associate Post Masters Mental Health Fellowship Program by:

• Providing fellows with opportunities to work with patients who represent a wide range of diversity, including ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socioeconomic status and abilities.
• Placing a high value on encouraging and supporting fellows’ willingness and ability to engage in self-reflection and learning about their assumptions, privileges and habits that could have a negative impact on clinical interactions with patients who are different in significant ways from them.
• Maintaining a consistent focus in clinical supervision on expanding fellows’ multicultural awareness and competence in the provision of psychotherapeutic services and by providing guidance and resources on topics related to diversity.
• Providing formal didactic training on a range of diversity topics (e.g., discovering and mitigating unconscious bias, respecting every voice, and cultivating a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace).
• Encouraging fellows to participate in the Regional Mental Health Training Program EID Forums, which provide advanced training on topics related to cultural humility and competence and a safe space in which to reflect upon and discuss their varied experiences.

Associate Post Masters Mental Health Fellows receive weekly, 2-hour, Didactic Trainings, provided by different clinicians from different clinics and departments in the region. These specific didactics will focus on diverse topics and therapeutic approaches, to enhance the knowledge and the clinical repertoire of our fellows.

Additionally, qualified fellows will receive 1 hour of Spanish Didactics per week on different therapeutic approaches and frameworks with the purpose of enhancing the clinical vocabulary and knowledge of cultural nuances treatment adaptations, and special cultural considerations.

Our Regional Mental Health Training Program also sponsors professional training courses for continuing professional development. These courses and presentations are offered at select times during the year for all KP mental health trainees and staff at Kaiser Northern California Medical Centers. We bring in national experts and keynote speakers on a variety of cutting-edge topics in mental health treatment and research. Fellows are required to attend these monthly regional trainings in addition to the weekly didactic seminars. Training course dates and a list of speakers and topics can be found on the Regional Mental Health Training Programs website. In addition, many of these lectures are recorded and available under the continuing education lecture library.

Associate Post Masters Mental Health Fellows will be participating in all or part of the following meetings (Depending on number of hours and days PMF is working per week):

• Weekly Staff Meetings
• La Clinica Meeting (Meeting where Spanish Speaking Clinicians and Psychiatrists provide support to each other and present cases)
• Bilingual Case Presentation (Meeting where clinicians present cases to receive support).
• Case Presentation (English)

Fellows also have the opportunity to participate in weekly Feedback Informed Care (FIC) case consultations.

All fellows are provided with two hours of weekly individual supervision with a primary and secondary supervisor, and two additional hours of weekly group supervision. Additional individual supervision is offered in Spanish, for 1 hour, on a weeklybasis.

The primary and secondary supervisor is responsible for supervising the direct delivery of clinical services. This supervisor takes the lead role in monitoring the fellow’s progress, providing feedback on strengths and areas in need of further development, ensuring effective and safe patient care, adequate documentation, and evaluating training schedules.

Group supervision includes opportunities for fellows to present and discuss cases. Fellows learn how to address treatment through a cultural framework including ethnicity, language, age, gender and sexual identity. Group supervision allows for vicarious learning, practice with professional public clinical presentations, and learning how to give and receive feedback.

Reflecting Kaiser Permanente’s core commitment to mental health and wellness in our communities, each trainee will spend at least 32 hours during their training year on a Community Partnership Project that focuses on improving mental health in the local community beyond our Kaiser Permanente members.

The goal of these projects is to provide outreach to underserved populations in the community to promote healthy behaviors. Training Objectives include developing acquaintance with the tenets of Community Psychology, as well as gaining experience in community outreach, and the development of partnerships within internal and external systems.

The goal of the bilingual (Spanish) Training Program at Kaiser Permanente is to prepare future therapists to serve our community through better addressing the culturally specific needs of bicultural/bilingual/monolingual (Spanish) Patients. Language and cultural barriers for Latinx Patients are addressed by this track through culturally informed supervision [provided directly in Spanish, and additional didactics/classes on psychotherapy theories and interventions also directly in Spanish. The Spanish supplemental didactics focus on how to make ordinary interventions more effective and culturally sensitive.

This track entails: Individual supervision in Spanish, group supervision in English, didactics in English (2 h weekly) and supplemental didactics in Spanish (one hour weekly) ; weekly meeting with “La Clinica” group of Spanish speaker Kaiser providers for support and peer case consultation in Spanish; culturally informed 1:1 mentorship in Spanish is also offered to promote professional growth and as local safe DEI space for BIPOC trainees (bi-weekly or TBD); trainees benefit also by additional regional mentorship program (in English) to support forming clinicians; Trainees are offered the opportunity to develop a curriculum and lead (together with a licensed Spanish speaking provider) a therapy group for Patients in Spanish at their work site (can be both in person or virtual); Spanish speaking supervisors for this track, do attend their own peer consultation group in Spanish to continue to foster and keep up to date their expertise in supervising in a different language. All trainees are also requested to engage in a community project (32 hours) where the trainee will give a direct service to the community using learnt skills. Trainees in this track may use Spanish language to deliver this service.

Therapeutic services are provided by the trainees in a hybrid format, sometimes in person and sometimes through video.

Trainees will have the opportunity to provide individual and group therapy to a wide range of patients suffering from diverse mental health conditions. Fellows will be able to join specialty programs depending on their particular interest. The specialty programs include Trauma Recovery Program (providing treatment to individuals suffering from PTSD, and Trauma Related Stressor Diagnosis), Focused Treatment Therapy (which aims to provide short term therapy for individuals who might need to adjust to changes in their lives, or other situational stressors), Couples Therapy (aims to support couples build better channels of communication, improve the quality of their emotional connection, or learn how to resolve conflict), and Depression Treatment Program (aiming to serve patients who suffer from Major Depressive Disorder).