Cooper University Health Care (CUHC), affiliated with Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, is the leading academic health care system in Southern New Jersey. Since 1887, Cooper has been providing high quality health care to all citizens of the region. Cooper also takes great pride in leading efforts to revitalize the city of Camden and surrounding areas, recognizing the need to address all social determinants of health to promote the wellbeing of our citizens.

Interns will have the opportunity to have integrated and interdisciplinary training experiences in multiple settings within Cooper University Health Care for various health-related problems, including: management of chronic illness, treatment non-adherence, pain management, smoking cessation, weight management, insomnia, coping with acute illness and hospitalization, palliative care, and assisting patients’ families with coping. There are also opportunities for cognitive and psychological assessment within a primary care setting, receiving referrals from the Urban Health Institute and Family Medicine.

Interns will see a variety of individuals across inpatient and outpatient settings, including patients/families across the lifespan with OB/GYN, Neonatology, Pediatrics, and all adult specialties, including Internal Medicine, Trauma, Cardiology, Neurology, and Orthopedics. Clinical expectations, driven by a cognitive behavioral, acceptance-based, and biopsychosocial models, include assessment, intervention (individual, group, family), psychoeducation, health promotion activities, provider education, and consultation/liaison work.  Behavioral Medicine promotes the availability of timely, goal-oriented, brief, and collaborative services designed to be consistent with a fast paced, academic medical environment and contemporary models of reimbursement for cost-effective clinical services. Interns can expect to provide 20 direct service hours per week across rotations and will have at least a total of 2000 internship hours at the end of the training year. Caseloads will be assigned and monitored to make sure that training is cumulative, sequential, and increasing in complexity throughout the year and within individual rotations length of time spent in each rotation throughout the year depends on the needs assessment and stated goals of the interns’ Professional Education Plan, as well as the needed time for a sufficient training experience (typically 4-6 months). All interns will experience most, if not all, of the rotations; outpatient integrated primary care and inpatient consultation-liaison rotations are required experiences for the duration of the training year.

For the 2023-2024 academic year, our program will be offering 4 total positions: Adult Concentration (2 positions; 80% adults, 20% pediatrics) and the Lifespan Concentration (2 positions; 70% pediatrics, 30% adults). 

The training environment will promote competency fundamental to the practice of health psychology through clinical, research, and didactic experiences. The attainment of profession-wide competencies will be achieved through the integration of clinical practice, didactics, and supervision. 

Interns will participate in specifically designed didactic seminars for a minimum of 2 hours per week throughout the training year. It is also anticipated that interns will have the opportunity to supervise pre-doctoral externs with the guidance of licensed clinical psychologists.

This program will train interns to build skills across the profession-wide competencies consistent with the Commission on Accreditation Implementing Regulations for health service psychology. Specific aims of the program include:

1. To train independent health service psychologists to practice at the top of their license by providing an environment conducive to learning all aspects of both general clinical and specialized practice in health psychology. Specifically, interns will learn how to be highly professional, ethical and competent in assessment, evidence-based intervention, treatment recommendations, interdisciplinary consultation, neurocognitive testing, and comprehensive psychological evaluations for surgery.
2. To expose interns to a range of theoretical orientations and types of psychological interventions (cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, motivational interviewing, mindfulness-based), integrated treatment settings, and multidisciplinary teams.
3. To provide an opportunity to work with a diverse patient population (culturally, racially, ethnically, linguistically, socioeconomically, religiously, gender and sexuality, and psychological/psychiatric presenting problems).