Table 1.
Recommendations associated with challenges in HSP training
|
Trainee Roles
|
| 1. Make definition of trainee roles consistent, transparent, and collaborative with trainees. |
| 2. Consider proposals to make internship postdoctoral. |
| 3. Trainee roles should be consistent with their rights, benefits, and obligations. |
|
Standards and Requirements |
| 4. Shift away from hours and toward competency-based requirements for internship. Consider implicit biases in measurement and evaluation of competency. |
| 5. Licensure and accreditation boards should retain flexible standards for hours, especially in the wake of crises like COVID-19. |
|
Training Aims |
| 6. Internships should query and incorporate trainee input into determining training aims. |
| 7. In the event that training aims change, trainee approval should be solicited for these changes. |
|
Locality |
| 8. Allow interns to work from off-site when their duties do not require face-to-face patient or supervisor interaction. |
| 9. Sites should allow interns to work across state lines for delimited periods of time, while adhering to applicable statutes. |
| 10. Build opportunities for interns to form mutually supportive relationships with colleagues and staff at their new location. |
| 11. Teleinterview options for internship should be adopted as a standard. Inequitable access to resources in conducted teleinterview should be considered. |
|
Telehealth |
| 12. Develop telehealth-specific training strategies, with competencies for telehealth and telesupervision included in training. |
| 13. Telehealth and telesupervision should be available options when feasible, with due consideration of trainee circumstances, as well as patient needs and quality of training and service delivery. |
|
Economic Security |
| 14. Internship sites should be required by accrediting bodies to provide health insurance coverage, with options to cover dependents. |
| 15. Internships should extend benefits usually given to full time employees to their interns, such as short-term disability, family or parental leave, and workers compensation. |
| 16. Raise intern salaries, with reference to median income for training site location rather than neighboring training sites. |
|
Supporting Diverse Trainees |
| 17. Internship programs should proactively address inequitable supervision, training, and human resources policies and praxes. |
| 18. Make antiracist and affirming resources (e.g., mentors, therapists, groups, confidential reporting processes, ombudspersons) available to trainees. |
| 19. Diversity-related activities should be valued and remunerated on par with other clinical and administrative work for trainees and staff, including consideration in evaluations for tenure, promotion, compensation, and accolades. |
|
Collaborative Decision Making |
| 20. Interns should be able to provide publicly available feedback on internships, in a public forum with endorsement from organizations such as CoA, APPIC, and CUDCP. |
| 21. Interns should be able to switch internships if necessary. |
| 22. Interns should have representation in the accrediting agencies and bodies that determine the standards for their own training. |
| 23. Interns should be involved in essential and valued activities at their training site, including providing mandatory didactics for faculty, grand rounds, and aspects of institutional decision-making. |
| 24. When trainee feedback is formally solicited through surveys or discussions, trainees should inform the evaluation process itself, with input into the domains being evaluated |