Experiences of Early Career Counseling Psychologists Working in Integrated Health Care

Abstract

Psychologists are increasingly represented among interprofessional health care teams, yet little is known about counseling psychologists who fulfill these roles. We interviewed 13 early career counseling psychologists in different settings across the country about their roles and functions, the nature of their relationships with other health professionals, and counseling psychology identity and values. Results showed that counseling psychologists perform a variety of duties by adapting their counseling psychology training to medical settings, and that they find this work both challenging and rewarding. Participants incorporated traditional counseling psychology pillars of prevention, diversity, social justice, and strength-based interventions to make contributions to patient and community care in integrated health care settings. Implications for training and future research are discussed.

Setting Our Sails: Counseling Psychology in the Age of Integrated Health Care

“…Many of us are doing this work, but we pose the question of whether our broader counseling psychology family is willing to bring interprofessional health care into the mainstream of our field. Berkel et al (2019) confirm what many have argued for some time: counseling psychologists' unique, informed, and culturally competent skills are needed in interprofessional health care. Other examples of this fact can be found in the integrated care training programs offered by the authors of this article and colleagues at their institutions.…”

“…It is critical for students to become involved in integrated care at the beginning of their time in graduate school, to help them view interprofessional collaboration as fundamental to their practice and competence. Berkel et al (2019) provide evidence that core skills in consultation, diversity, cultural humility, rapport building, psychotherapy, and generalist intervention skill sets contribute to the development of skills in integrated health care. Counseling psychologists, traditionally equipped with these skills, are often ready to handle many of the issues that patients bring to our offices, making our work extremely amenable to the "no wrong door" philosophy of integrated care in terms of accepting psychology referrals from other health care providers.…”

“…Further, we can advocate within health systems for services when patients' needs go unnoticed or ignored by other health care providers, and bring a humanistic and holistic perspective to settings that all too often only emphasize biomedical diagnosis and treatment. Despite the concrete examples of how counseling psychologists can enact these roles (Berkel et al, 2019) and make interprofessional competencies integral to our training curriculum (Boland et al, 2019), we think there are several important issues facing our programs that should be considered.…”

Analysis of General Practitioners’ Attitudes and Beliefs about Psychological Intervention and the Medicine-Psychology Relationship in Primary Care: Toward a New Comprehensive Approach to Primary Health Care

“…For this reason, it seems increasingly necessary to evaluate the opportunity for a joint intervention of GPs and psychologists to better address these constraints and complexities. In several countries, similar studies on psychologist identities in primary care, and, more generally, on the interprofessional competencies in primary care, have been conducted [43,44], but further and more systematic investigations are needed; for example, it would be useful to conduct a multinational survey on these topics and enlarge the research scope by investigating beliefs about this new comprehensive approach to the primary health care system expressed by patients, psychologists, and other health professionals. These studies should also overcome other limitations that our research design certainly includes, such as the use of non-standardized measures, the limited number of respondents not representative of the entire population of GPs, and the fact that the data collection took place before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which certainly may have changed the perceptions of patients and physicians with respect to the need for more comprehensive and integrated primary health care.…”

Counseling Psychologists and Behavioral Health: Promoting Mental and Physical Health Outcomes

“…4. Engage in consultation in health care settings to infuse strengthbased, preventive, educational, and multicultural values as part of behavioral health care (e.g., Berkel et al, 2019;Boland et al, 2019). 5.…”