University Hospital offers four one-year, post-doctoral fellowships in clinical Health Psychology. Three of these positions are in the Adult Track and one of these positions is in the Pediatric Track.
About our program
The program involves a 12-month, full-time experience (2,000 hours), providing the necessary post-doctoral hours required for licensure to practice psychology independently in the state of Wisconsin. The program is designed to provide didactic and clinical training in preparation for professional work in a variety of medical settings. Graduates of our program are competitively prepared to work in academic medical centers, private hospitals, independent psychology practices with medical specialization, academic psychology departments and outpatient medical clinics.
The program is based upon a practitioner-scholar model offering hands-on experience complemented by knowledge of relevant psychological science. Our intent is to prepare fellows to move competently across a variety of health psychology settings and to use a wide range of skills.
Program philosophy
Based in a nationally recognized academic medical center, the fellowship program involves training with a wide variety of patients, problems and treatment teams. Our philosophy is to provide a broad array of experiences across the medical center rather than specialized training in one or two areas. A minimum of 80 percent of each fellow’s time is focused on adult medical-surgical inpatients at UW Hospitals and Clinics (Adult Track) or with pediatric medical-surgical inpatients and their families at American Family Children’s Hospital (Pediatric Track). In this capacity, fellows work across a variety of medical services and provide assessment and treatment to patients and their families with acute and chronic needs.
During this 80 percent time, fellows may also gain experience performing pre-procedural psychological evaluations (such as outpatient pre-surgical transplantation evaluations for potential organ transplant recipients and living organ donors and performs outpatient evaluations in the Pediatric and Adolescent Transgender Health (PATH) service.)
Each of the fellows will then spend the other 20 percent time (eight hours per week) on a distinct medical specialty elective rotation. The nature of this rotation will depend upon the interests of the post-doctoral fellow as well as the recommendation of the training director and the availability of these sites from year to year. Potential rotation sites may include:
- Inpatient Rehabilitation
- Outpatient Cancer Psychology
- Outpatient Adult Health Psychology
- Transplant Psychology
- Digestive Health Psychology
- Outpatient Pediatric Health Psychology
In these clinics, fellows perform assessment and interventions with a specialty medical population under the supervision of an elective health psychology supervisor. In some clinics, fellows will perform group psychotherapy.
Throughout their experiences and the training year, fellows are required to perform consultation with multidisciplinary medical teams and often play a key role as the psychological consultant to these teams. Fellows also have the opportunity to engage in program development, mentoring of practicum students and interns (when on site) and/or teaching of medical residents and other allied health providers during their training year.
The fellowship program is a member of APPIC and administered by the Health Psychology faculty within the Department of Behavioral Medicine.
More information
Contact information
Stephanie Farrell, Ph.D.
Director of Fellowship Training in Health Psychology
University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics
600 Highland Avenue
Madison, WI
sfarrell@uwhealth.org
(608) 262-9185