Postdoctoral Residency – Redwood City

We are committed to nurturing and integrating diversity training into all aspects of our postdoctoral residency program by:

Providing residents 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 residents’ 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 residents’ multicultural awareness and competence in the provision of psychotherapeutic services and providing guidance, training, and resources on topics such as mitigating unconscious bias, respecting every voice, and cultivating a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace.

Residents are encouraged to participate in the Regional Mental Health Training Program EID Committee’s advanced trainings on topics related to cultural sensitivity and competence along with a forum to reflect on and discuss their varied experiences in a safe environment.

Clinic services demonstrating our EID commitment:

• La Clinica Latina, a program dedicated to providing linguistic (Spanish) and culturally informed individual and group therapy services to members of the Latinx population
• Journeys group (transgender/questioning support)
• Gender Affirming Parenting class
• Gender Affirming Teen class
• Asian American Pacific Islander Wellness group
• Black Wellness group
• Women of Color Empowerment group

Regularly scheduled weekly didactic seminars, formerly held at the consortium level, are now organized, and administered regionally for all KP NorCal postdoctoral residents. Residents are required to attend a two-hour weekly virtual seminar, which focuses on developing competencies and expertise in clinical areas most relevant to their day-to-day work.

Our Regional Mental Health Training Program also sponsors seminars for continuing professional development. The seminars 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 local and national experts on a variety of cutting-edge topics in mental health treatment and research. Regional seminar dates and a list of speakers and topics can be found on the Regional Mental Health Training Programs website. In addition, many of the presentations are recorded and available under the continuing education lecture library webpage.

Residents attend various weekly team or departmental meetings, in addition to:

• Group supervision with the postdoctoral training cohort which includes case consultation and discussion of professional development topics. Residents gain experience giving and receiving feedback which helps them to develop the collegial and supervisory aspects of their professional identities as psychologists.
• Training in supervised supervision including participation in facilitating group supervision of practicum externs over the course of the training year.

Telehealth Training:
Kaiser Permanente has greatly expanded its’ virtual presence, which will allow residents to fully train and practice in a variety of trailblazing platforms in telemedicine to provide accessible mental health care.

All postdoctoral residents are supervised by licensed psychologists and are assigned to a primary supervisor and a secondary supervisor. The clinical supervisors meet with their assigned resident one hour per week for individual face-to-face supervision. Thus, each resident has two hours of individual supervision per week.

The primary and secondary supervisors are responsible for overseeing the direct delivery of clinical services. The primary supervisor takes a lead role in developing the resident’s learning plan, monitoring their progress, and evaluating their training schedule. The primary supervisor is also responsible for completing the resident’s evaluation after gathering input from other supervisors and staff who may have provided supplementary supervision during rotations or while co-facilitating groups with the resident.

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 San Mateo County community beyond our Kaiser Permanente patient members. Projects may include presentations on mental health topics or career mentoring in such settings as colleges/schools, faith-based organizations, and other local organizations dedicated to assisting those in need.

The goal of this project is to provide outreach to underserved populations to promote health and advancement. Anchors for the project include developing alliances with individuals and/or systems to improve the lives of those served; providing education and training based on the empirical literature; and presenting relevant outcomes data to partnership stakeholders. Residents will meet with the Community Partnership supervisor to assist with placement and the development of a project.

Psychological assessment is a requirement of this residency to ensure a well-rounded training experience. All residents in our program will conduct at least two ADHD evaluations. The evaluation consists of administering a battery of measures and performance tests, interpreting the results, composing a formal report, and providing feedback to the patient. Residents receive weekly supervision for support, consultation, and training related to assessment.

Each resident is required to undertake a program evaluation project during their training year. The project is selected based upon the resident’s interests and skill set and should fall within the regular scope of departmental services.

It may involve collecting and analyzing data to improve administrative operations, or a quality improvement project aimed at improving or assessing a treatment program or process. Examples include developing and evaluating a treatment group, intake procedure or other new programming; evaluating factors associated with treatment outcomes; or a needs assessment of a service that may be enriched by psychological consultation. Residents meet with the program evaluation supervisor as a group regularly over the course of the training year to review progress on their projects.

The population served in Adult Psychiatry is diverse in terms of ethnicity (primarily Caucasian, Latinx, and Asian/Pacific Islander members), socio-economic status, educational attainment (e.g., elementary school to doctoral), and presenting problems and symptomatology. Common diagnoses include major depression, peri- and postpartum depression, anxiety disorders (e.g., generalized, panic, phobias), PTSD and trauma-related disorders, and OCD. The service offers specialty therapy groups that address the aforementioned disorders and challenges. Additionally, our clinic offers a gender support group to aid individuals exploring their gender identity and/or transitioning into a congruent gender identity.
Training via co-facilitation of therapy groups is designed to enhance and expand a resident’s knowledge and proficiency in the use of evidence-based interventions. Evidence-based modalities utilized in our clinic include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). Residents typically see between 10 to 15 individual patients per week including two intake assessments per week.

Residents in this track also have a year-long rotation in our Adult Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP). IOP is focused on crisis stabilization and is intended to either (1) prevent patients from becoming hospitalized (e.g., expressing SI/HI without necessarily imminent danger and/or subthreshold grave disability) or (2) assist patients being discharged from an involuntary hospitalization transition effectively back into their home communities.
The majority of our therapy groups are behaviorally oriented and utilize evidence-based frameworks. However, residents are not required to operate from a specific theoretical orientation when conceptualizing and/or treating their individual therapy cases. Supervisors in the Adult Psychiatry track is dedicated to helping residents develop their skills in a manner that aligns with their values.

The Adult Psychiatry service operates as a multidisciplinary team (e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, LCSWs, LMFTs, psychiatric nurses, medical assistants, etc.) to provide the best care for our patients. Residents will hone their ability to communicate with other professionals.

The resident in the Child and Adolescent track will work with children, teens, and families in individual, dyadic, family, group, and consultation-liaison treatment modalities. Depending on the rotations selected, residents can expect to be trained in CBT, family systems therapy, parent management training, solution-focused therapy, and brief psychodynamic interventions.

Residents also have an array of therapy groups they can co-facilitate such as Teen IOP, CBT and ACT-based skills groups, and parent management training groups. An exceptional opportunity associated with this track is a rotation providing consultation-liaison services in our Pediatrics department. Residents typically complete between 2 to 3 mental health assessments per week. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry providers operate within the context of a multidisciplinary team consisting of psychiatrists, psychologists, LCSWs, LMFTs, and case managers.

The Addiction Medicine and Recovery Services (AMRS) offers adult intensive recovery services, ongoing recovery groups, harm reduction treatment, dual diagnosis treatment, medication assisted treatment, withdrawal management services, adolescent treatment, and codependency treatment on an outpatient basis. Over the course of the year, the resident will gain expertise in utilizing evidence-based substance use and dual diagnosis treatment modalities.

The AMRS resident will work with patients of various ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds who present with a range of Axis I and Axis II diagnoses. Trauma is a common presenting problem which the resident will address with trauma-informed techniques such as psychoeducation about trauma and the nervous system, techniques from the Seeking Safety curriculum, grounding/mindfulness, and role play. Other treatment strategies utilized include elements of DBT, CBT, ACT, CFT, and brief psychodynamic psychotherapy.

The resident will conduct mainly brief individual therapy but will carry several longer- term cases as clinically indicated. The resident will see 3-4 new patients a week generally amassing a 30-40 patient caseload over the training year. The resident will also have opportunity to conduct treatment with couples and will co-facilitate psychoeducational, skills-based, and process-oriented groups.