Our internship is a collaborative effort between the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. Our administrative location is within Pediatrics and we offer clinical training experiences across both departments.

The USF Health Department of Pediatrics is a large academic medical center whose mission is to be stewards of our community’s most vulnerable and important resource–our children. USF Health Pediatrics provides primary and specialty care for infants, children and adolescents; develops treatments and cures for pediatric diseases through research; advances children’s issues through advocacy and community engagement; and trains future pediatricians, psychologists and other allied health providers.

The USF Health Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience is an integral part of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. The department has received national and international recognition as a center for research and development of innovative approaches to treatment. The mission of the department is to educate health care practitioners about mental, addictive and behavioral disorders, advance scientific knowledge about the nature, causes and treatment of these conditions, and provide exemplary models of clinical care in order to benefit the health and well-being of the people of Florida.

The major goal of our internship is to provide an integrated, individually tailored, and coordinated series of learning experiences that will serve interns with opportunities to:

• practice and expand on previously held knowledge and learned skills,
• develop new skills and knowledge, and
• experience personal and professional growth and development across clinical settings. Interns will serve populations across the lifespan, including children and adolescents, families, and the primary care providers who regularly interact with children and families (e.g., physicians, teachers).

During internship training, interns will engage in learning experiences that are designed to be cumulative in nature. Through daily activities interns will have opportunities to achieve the following training objectives:

1. Apply ethical decision making to complex clinical and research activities;
2. Develop knowledge and skills in delivering services within primary care settings and collaborate across settings and care-providers;
3. Develop and demonstrate a commitment to evidence-based intervention procedures
4. Receive exposure to psychological and mental health services within broad community contexts and across a breadth of treatment facilities
5. Demonstrate a commitment to individual differences
6. Develop an appreciation for and commitment to research, including scientific practices and/or research activities
7. Generate research questions related to work with clients and answer those questions; and
8. Develop competencies to evaluate the efficacy of trainee’s work with different clients and systems.

Our Early Steps Program offers training experiences in child and adolescent assessment, young adult assessment, intervention, and an experience in infant and early childhood assessment with patients from birth to three years old. As part of these rotations, interns will gain experience in comprehensive psychoeducational evaluations for common childhood disorders (e.g., ADHD, SLD, anxiety, IND, and ASD) and evidence-based recommendations for treatment; adolescent mental health and therapy including the treatment of multiple populations (e.g., gender dysphoria, trauma history, OCD, anxiety); treatment for early childhood disruptive behavior disorders (e.g., HOT DOCS, and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, trauma-informed early intervention), and integrated behavioral-health within our primary care clinics.