Postdoctoral Fellowship in Addiction Medicine/Addiction Medicine Fellowship Opportunity
Geisinger Health System has an opportunity for a one-year fellowship in addiction medicine at Marworth, our alcohol and chemical dependency facility. This unique fellowship is open to board certified or board eligible physicians from virtually any specialty. The fellowship will prepare the fellow for the certification examination offered by the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The successful applicant will hold a Pennsylvania medical license and a DEA registration prior to the start of the fellowship. 

The fellow will provide inpatient and outpatient chemical dependency assessments and treatment as well as consultations in a center that is known regionally as well as nationally for excellence in the delivery of care for chemical dependency. There will be opportunities to provide chemical dependency counseling as well as opportunities to provide appropriate psychotherapy under the direct supervision of experienced, credentialed, qualified, physicians. The fellow will be responsible for a research project and will have the opportunity to participate in educational presentations within Marworth, the Geisinger system, as well as national conferences.

The primary training method is supervised service delivery and direct contact with chemical-dependency patients in a very dynamic and active treatment facility. Supervision and oversight will at all times be consistent with training activities so as to provide an intensive and advanced experience while maintaining standards that have brought Marworth to national prominence as a service provider in the chemical dependency field. Since the fellowship began, the fellow has averaged approximately ten hours a week of individual supervision in the responsibilities noted above.  The fellow clearly has extraordinary access for supervisor consultation and intervention. This is viewed as necessary, given the somewhat unique challenges provided by the Marworth patient population and the expectations for clinical excellence by referring agencies. 

Scheduled duty hours will typically be 7:30 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday with call approximately every fourth night and every fourth weekend. A general goal of the program is to develop advanced practice competencies and expertise in addiction medicine based upon sound scientific and professional practice foundations. A general goal is to ensure and extraordinary competence in addiction medicine. The fellowship contains a formal psychiatry rotation at Danville, the main Geisinger Medical Center campus. There is emphasis on process addictions (i.e., gambling, sexual addiction, eating disorders), medical/legal issues, forensic issues, opioid agonist therapy, detoxification strategies and administrative medicine.  

This is intended to provide a broad educational experience in addiction medicine and is a fellowship that contains elements that may be rare or nonexistent in other addiction medicine fellowship opportunities.

Mission

Heal
The addiction medicine fellowship should teach physicians, drawn from a variety of disciplines, approaches to caring for chemically dependent individuals. The fellowship is also intended to provide broad training directed at the treatment of a wide variety of comorbid medical and psychiatric conditions. The graduates of the Marworth addiction medicine fellowship should be well prepared to pass the ASAM certification exam while having developed lifelong learning skills to maintain certification and enrich those skills through years of their practice.

Teach
To heal, a physician must be able to relate to the patient non-judgmentally and offer healing of mind, body, and spirit. The addiction medicine fellowship seeks to train each graduate to become an effective communicator and teacher of patients, as well as a community resource.

Discover
Each graduate of this program will need skills as a lifelong learner to seek new knowledge of the rapidly changing field of chemical dependency. The fellow must learn to explore the specifics of scientifically based decision making and problem solving. The graduate needs to be able to incorporate new and developing modalities both pharmacologic and psychological/psychiatric into his/her skills and to adapt as the field expands and improves.

Serve
This fellowship seeks to train addiction medicine fellows who will serve their communities and their profession.  The addiction medicine fellowship at Marworth/Geisinger seeks to serve persons of all races and creeds such that the graduate will be comfortable providing care in a wide variety of venues.