The Dorothy B. Hersh Child Protection Center (DBH-CPC) is a child maltreatment program associated with Saint Peter’s University Hospital and provides internship training to pre-doctoral psychology students. DBH-CPC provides children and families with psychological and medical evaluations and psychological treatment related to child abuse concerns, which includes medical, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The staff at the DBH-CPC is a multidisciplinary team of culturally diverse health care professionals including pediatricians, registered nurses, psychologists, and social workers. The goal of the internship program at DBH-CPC is to provide interns with supervised direct service training in pediatric and clinical child psychology to prepare them for entry level psychology practice. Interns completing a pre-doctoral internship year at DBH-CPC develop advanced skills in assessment, case conceptualization, and psychotherapy techniques for use with clinical child maltreatment difficulties and family dynamics. Interns participate in training and educational seminars, as well as supervision with experienced psychologists, to enhance their skills related to the evaluation and treatment of children, adolescents, and adults. Interns are trained to diagnose and treat trauma in child maltreatment and family violence. Interns spend 40 hours each week participating in program activities. Activities include conducting evaluations of children, parents or family members where abuse is suspected or substantiated as well as psychotherapy and treatment planning and interfaces with child protective services, the state prosecutor, and numerous collateral agencies. The interns additionally have many opportunities for further learning through weekly individual and group supervision, didactic presentations, in-services, and pediatric rounds.
The priority of the training program at the DBH-CPC is to provide outstanding clinical opportunities for doctoral students seeking to learn about child maltreatment. Particularly, it is the intent of the program that interns who complete the program will understand the dynamics of child maltreatment so they may provide evaluative and treatment services to families, within the community in need. The DBH-CPC is one of four legislatively mandated regional diagnostic and treatment centers for child maltreatment and family violence in the state of New Jersey. The primary source of funding for the program is a state legislated grant. The program establishes a yearly budget contingent on the state grant and therefor is not reliant on billing for services provided by interns. The DBH-CPC is fully sustained through the grant without the need for an identified level of production from the interns. Additionally, the program is intended to provide clinical experiences to the interns at a level they are most comfortable. That is, the interns initially learn principles of forensic evaluation and treatment by observing evaluations conducted by a licensed psychologist in vivo or through video recording. The intern subsequently participates in evaluations with a licensed psychologist and subsequently conducts independent evaluations when the intern and the intern’s supervisor acknowledged the intern is sufficiently prepared to do so. The emphasis for the interns is enhancing clinical skills so they are best prepared for licensed practice.
The DBH-CPC provides evaluation and treatment services to seven diverse counties in central New Jersey. The populations served within our catchment region are diverse in many ways including race, religion, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. It is of paramount importance that each child, adolescent, and adult who seeks service at the DBH-CPC receives the highest quality care and respect. As such, interns learn about the diverse populations with whom they interact. Emphases on exploring the impact of issues related to cultural diversity are explored during individual and group supervision with each client who interacts with the interns. The interns are challenged to explore how the client as well as the intern’s own cultural differences impact the therapeutic experience. Additionally, the interns will learn about the impact culture has on issues related to child maltreatment during educational seminars and rounds with the medical residence. Further, each intern is required to present a therapy or evaluation case presentation on at least two occasions during their internship training. During the case presentations the interns are required to identify and discuss how culture impacted the reason for referral, the client’s response to the trauma, and its impact on the therapy process. Focused explorations of the dynamics that are identified during the case presentations are discussed during individual and group supervision, prior to the presentation. Finally, respect of client and staff diversity is a required standard of all medical center employees, including interns, and is reviewed during general and DHB-CPC program orientation.
