Program overview
Didactic seminars and professional development
At the beginning of your training year, you’ll attend an orientation dedicated to onboarding and professional development. Once you’re onboarded, you’ll attend monthly seminars about professional topics that will prepare you for your first professional position as a licensed psychologist in an academic health system. These seminars will cover a variety of health psychology topics, including (but not limited to):
- Preparation for the EPPP
- Vita preparation
- Interviewing skills
- Salary negotiation
- Board certification (ABPP)
- Suicide risk assessment and safety planning
- Brief behavioral interventions
- CBT for insomnia
- Diversity/internal bias training
- Health behavior change
- Migraines
- TBI and neurologic conditions
- LGBTQ issues
Our fellows and supervisors present and discuss challenging health-focused cases in a supervised group each month.
Fellowship tracks
This is a psychology postdoctoral position (fellowship) with primary supervisor Dr. Laura Adams. As a fellow, you’ll provide clinical care for patients under the supervision of attending psychologists. The position is full-time and you’ll complete all job responsibilities onsite. Geisinger Psychology services offers in-person and telemedicine visits.
- Conducting initial assessments and evaluations
- Collaborating with patients to improve treatment readiness, adherence and treatment planning/goals
- Providing evidence-based behavioral medicine treatment in individual and group formats
- Leading psychoeducational lectures within various multidisciplinary clinics
This position is with supervisor Dr. Kathryn Harple. As a fellow, you’ll provide clinical care for patients under the supervision of attending psychologists. The position is full-time, and you’ll complete all job responsibilities onsite. Geisinger Psychology services offers in-person and telemedicine visits.
Primary care psychologists — and those in training — are valuable team members who are consulted for a variety of concerns, including:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Acute stress disorder
- Smoking cessation
- Weight loss
- Treatment adherence for chronic diseases such as COPD, heart failure and diabetes
In this role, you’ll provide targeted, evidence-based care through warm handoffs and brief treatment episodes. You’ll also hone your collaboration skills as you routinely work with attending physicians, residents, psychiatrists, advanced practitioners, medical case managers, nursing staff and medical pharmacists to deliver comprehensive, quality care. Your attendance at team huddles, provider meetings and Medical Home meetings will provide you with additional interdisciplinary, team-based care opportunities.
This position contains two rotations. Forty percent of your time will be spent with the Adult Primary Care Behavioral Health Program at Geisinger’s Mount Pleasant Clinic. The other 60% is within the Cancer Center at Geisinger Wyoming Valley. You’ll work with supervisors Dr. Kylie Oleski and Dr. Ashley Perez.
As a fellow, you’ll provide clinical care for patients under the supervision of attending psychologists. This position is full-time, and you’ll complete all job responsibilities onsite. Geisinger Psychology services offers in-person and telemedicine visits.
Primary care psychologists — and those in training — are valuable team members who are consulted for a variety of concerns, including:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Acute stress disorder
- Smoking cessation
- Weight loss
- Treatment adherence for chronic diseases such as COPD, heart failure and diabetes
In this position, you’ll provide targeted, evidence-based care through warm handoffs and brief treatment episodes. You’ll hone your collaboration skills as you routinely work with attending physicians, residents, psychiatrists, advanced practitioners, medical case managers, nursing staff and medical pharmacists to deliver comprehensive, quality care. Your attendance at team huddles, provider meetings and Medical Home meetings will provide you with additional interdisciplinary, team-based care opportunities.
Summary of PsychoOncology responsibilities:
- Provide integrated behavioral healthcare to cancer patients and their families while coordinating with medical providers
- Provide short-term outpatient psychotherapy, curbside consultations and possibly inpatient consultations
- Participate in disease-site specific tumor board meetings
- Collaborate with bone marrow transplant team and complete pre-transplant evaluations
- Be at the Cancer Clinic on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
Geisinger offers a comprehensive fellowship in pediatric behavioral health consultation and liaison psychology. We prepare program graduates to serve as leaders, clinicians and clinical supervisors in children's hospitals, on pediatric specialty teams and in academic medical centers. We follow the scientist-practitioner model of psychological practice and base clinical training experiences on a developmental model. Faculty members supervise active clinical practices, and fellows function with considerable autonomy, assuming junior-level staff responsibilities.
During your fellowship year, you’ll work at Geisinger Janet Weis Children's Hospital, which is connected to Geisinger Medical Center. You’ll serve in the Geisinger emergency department on multi-disciplinary teams and as part of the Pediatric Bridge Clinic. You’ll also work with other emergency departments in the Geisinger system via telemedicine.
Consultation in Geisinger Janet Weis Children's Hospital
Geisinger has its own children's hospital and pediatricians who represent all common pediatric subspecialties. We highly value psychologists as part of the team in pediatric hospital-based care. Pediatric oncologists, neurologists, intensive care specialists, endocrinologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists and nephrologists frequently collaborate in patient care. Fellows conduct inpatient consultations in the children's hospital, which includes the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
Psychiatric Emergency Services
We help our fellows learn emergency psychiatric assessment and intervention skills. These include the assessment and triage of suicidal or aggressive patients, management of family crises and an understanding how medical conditions and substances contribute to acute symptoms.
Pediatric Bridge Clinic
We designed the Bridge Clinic to meet the emerging behavioral health needs of pediatric patients lacking clear outpatient follow-up when presenting to the Emergency Department in crisis. Serving as an extension of the C/L service, the Bridge Clinic provides rapid access to evidence-based care with providers who intimately know the assessment, intervention and systems involved in psychiatric emergency care.
Psychiatry and Pediatric Grand Rounds
You’ll attend weekly psychiatry and pediatric grand rounds, which include presentations by Geisinger faculty and outside speakers. We require each fellow to make a presentation during psychiatry or pediatric grand rounds.
Research
We encourage fellows to use evidence-based practice in their clinical work and participate in one of several research projects with training faculty.
Training opportunities include working within a multidisciplinary team to evaluate the developmental, social and behavioral needs of children with suspected developmental disabilities and/or autism. As a postdoctoral fellow, you’ll also gain experience in coordinating care for patients and consulting with other medical professionals to determine patients’ recommended treatment plans. Opportunities to provide individual and group therapy are also available.
Geisinger’s Autism and Developmental Medicine Institute is a clinical and research institute known for advancing scientific understanding of developmental disorders. Our team consists of licensed psychologists, neurodevelopmental pediatricians, advanced practitioners, genetic counselors, medical geneticists and speech and language pathologists. We conduct multiple research projects to help advance the understanding of causes and treatments of neurodevelopmental conditions alongside the institution’s clinical work. You may also have opportunities to be a part of the institute’s ongoing research projects.
Geisinger invites applicants to join an enthusiastic and vibrant team of pediatric psychologists for three postdoctoral fellowship positions in Pediatric Primary Care Behavioral Health (PCBH). These positions are in the system’s Central Region at the Woodbine, Bloomsburg and Selinsgrove/Lewisburg PCBH clinics. Fellows will work full-time under the supervision of a licensed psychologist.
These positions offer opportunities to:
- Provide clinical supervision to trainees
- Deliver evidence-based care to children, adolescents and families
- Conduct a high volume of consultation to medical providers and clinical staff
- Educate and train medical professionals on behavioral health topics
- Participate in program evaluation of integrated care services
- Develop new clinical programs
- Lead clinic-wide improvement projects
- Gain insight as to operational and clinical factors of service development
The patients we serve in PCBH clinics are from birth age to 18 years. They generally have a variety of issues, from traditional mental health concerns to pediatric psychology presentations such as toileting, feeding and sleep problems. We provide clinical services such as family therapy, individual therapy, group therapy and warm handoffs.
While these positions are primarily clinical, fellows have the opportunity to participate in research activities. You don’t need to be seeking a research career to qualify. You’ll also have opportunities to participate in ongoing treatment outcome research and/or to develop new research projects. Program graduates are highly successful obtaining jobs in academia, PCBH and academic medical centers.