The Mental Health Training Program (MHTP) is embarking on a new adventure this fall. When psychology trainees arrive to start their training year, they will have the opportunity to join the Evaluation and Quality Improvement (EQI) Psychology Lab. Psychology Doctoral Interns and Postdoctoral Fellows have been conducting program evaluations and needs assessments at local medical centers for the past 20 years. The EQI Lab is an effort to centralize the scholarly inquiry being conducted by Kaiser’s psychology trainees across Northern California.
Through weekly meetings and mentorship, Doctoral Interns and Postdoctoral Fellows will contribute to ongoing projects focused on improving mental health care in our clinics and medical centers. Trainees will receive didactics in ethical research, program evaluation models, and approaches to quality improvement. We are hoping that by collaborating in small teams on topics they are interested in, they will build research comradery and continue pursuing these interests far beyond their training year with us.
To ensure that the investigations are relevant to the clinical work being conducted at Kaiser Permanente, we have included staff clinicians as Subject Matter Experts in the areas of Health Psychology, Trauma Treatment, Training in Psychology, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and Outcomes Measurement. Initial aims include identifying factors impacting attendance/drop out and treatment adherence, creating measurements of fidelity, assessing patient outcomes and long-term effects of treatment, improving workflows, and identifying needs for future interventions.
We hope that by facilitating trainees collaborating as a team and engaging staff clinicians who are interested in research as well, we will expand upon scholarly inquiry training goals, improve the quality of our work, disseminate findings more widely, and continue to build on existing projects year after year. Collaboration with the Graduate Medical Education Scholarly Inquiry Program, Division of Research, DARE, and A-PRIME has been integral in getting this project off the ground. We are excited to introduce these trainees to the wonderful research community that Kaiser Permanente has created!
Contributed by: Ana Zdravkovic, PhD
