SAPIC is an APA Accredited Internship Program

The SAPIC 2024-2025 Internship Program Structure: Interns will spend up to 30 hours per week or 3 days/week at one clinical site for the whole year, called their primary rotation. This will provide a depth of clinical experience and integration into clinical teams. Interns will be placed in an Assessment Secondary rotation for 8-10 hours per week, 6 months of the year and will choose a secondary rotation for 6 months of the year. With each primary and secondary rotation, the intern receives one hour of face-to-face individual supervision with SAPIC faculty.

Rotation and Program Description

Primary tracks:

1. Child and Family Services Program (1 intern)
2. Adult Therapy Team Integrated Care  (2 interns)

1) Child and Family Services Program

We accept one primary track psychology intern into the Child and Family Services Program each internship year.  Interns from other tracks can do “secondary” rotations in this Program.  Our Program provides a wide range of services including office services and home-based child and family services, birth to five services, Spanish speaking services, school-based services, adolescent and young adult services, and group therapy services.

The intern will receive clinical supervision from the supervising psychologist, and administrative guidance from the Director of the Child and Family Services Program and/or a Child and Family Unit supervisor. Each intern will develop a self-designed clinical experience that is relevant to their professional goals.  We encourage the intern to pursue a broad range of clinical exposure working with children, adolescents, and their families. We expect this experience to include:  family systems work, clinical work (including assessment and direct services) with varying age ranges and clinical populations (ages 0-21), research and program design, and consultation, training, and supervision opportunities.  Child and Family interns are expected to work late (e.g., to 6-7 p.m.) 1-2 evenings a week to accommodate scheduling of services for children and families.

Due to the rich professional opportunities available in our Program, in 2012 our Child and Family rotations were identified as being “a strong family psychology training internship” by the APA Division 43 (Society for Family Psychology).

2) The Adult Therapy Team- Integrated Care

We accept two primary track psychology interns into the Adult Therapy Team-Integrated Care rotation. This rotation has a focus on clinical health psychology with a culturally and linguistically diverse population of adults with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) and General Mental Health (GMH) designations.  One of the interns’ positions is housed at La Frontera Center’s Main clinic, and the other at the East Grant Crossroads site.  Both sites offer a wide variety of educational, vocational, skills-based and process groups, to the approximately 2,000 members enrolled.  The interns serve as a supplemental therapist for this team, delivering individual and group therapy, and providing consultation to an interdisciplinary team. They maintain an individual therapy caseload of approximately 12-14 clients per week, and are on site M/W/F. They may also have the opportunity to provide group therapy related to various mental health topics, depending on their interests.

The interns develop both knowledge-based and applied competencies in conducting assessment, intervention, consultation, supervision/training, and management/administration activities in accordance with best practice recommendations from the First Counsel of Clinical Health Psychology Training Programs (Masters, France, & Thorn, 2009).  To this end, the interns implement empirically supported individual and group treatment interventions as well health promotion and prevention interventions appropriate for each client’s physical illness, injury, or disability in the context of an interdisciplinary team (e.g., motivational interviewing for smoking cessation or diabetes treatment adherence, nCPAP desensitization, ACT for chronic pain, etc.).

The interns are also encouraged to select assessment referrals that include a comprehensive biopsychosocial interview and require evaluation of objective biological and psychosocial findings related to physical health or illness/injury/disability (e.g., presurgical evaluations for bariatric surgery), when referrals are available. The interns interact with clients of the interdisciplinary team in ways that facilitate improved treatment implementation based on the unique contributions that clinical health psychology can make.  Through the ESTEP project (described later), the interns evaluate the effectiveness and quality of clinical health psychology services (e.g., utilizing a pre-post pain coping strategies questionnaire to evaluate effectiveness of a 12-week CBT for chronic pain group).

The interns have some flexibility in customizing their role to meet specific clinical health psychology training goals that address client needs and align with organizational values.  The focus on clinical health psychology will depend in part, on referrals for clients who need these services.  Interns will also have many opportunities to work on behavioral health goals not directly related to health, such as: trauma, substance abuse/co-occurring disorders, anxiety, depression, and more. This is a dynamic and exciting rotation.

Secondary Rotations

Several Secondary rotations are available: these rotations are available for 6 months (i.e. one Secondary rotation per year in addition to the mandatory Assessment Rotation). Interns will be required to submit their top 3 choices and every effort will be made to match interns to one of their identified choices.  If the intern wishes to self-design a Secondary rotation, a written proposal with clearly defined structure, guidelines and expectations must be submitted by the intern to the faculty for approval.  In either case, interns will participate in their Secondary rotation for 8-10 hours a week, for about 24 weeks (2 rotations/year), to fill out their training experience.

Adult Therapy Team – Integrated Care: The intern will participate as a clinician on the Adult Therapy Team – Integrated Care.  During this Secondary rotation the intern will have opportunities to conduct:

• One to two groups per week.
• Individual and/or couple’s therapy.
• The intern’s caseload can be tailored to interest and request including: specific populations, couples or families, and diagnoses.

Child/Family Services:  Numerous opportunities (e.g., one intern was a co-therapist with a family therapist) will be further explored and fleshed out.  Interns may serve as co-therapist to various full time therapists, join treatment groups, provide child/family intakes as well as individual psychotherapy. SAPIC faculty, associated program managers, and interns will continue to discuss options for this Secondary rotation.

Clinical Services at the University of Arizona SALT (Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques) Center:  The intern in this rotation will primarily be conducting individual therapy to college students enrolled in the SALT Center, an academic support program for students with learning or attention challenges. Since 1980, the SALT Center has become the most comprehensive program of its kind in the nation and has helped thousands of students successfully complete postsecondary education. With extensive programming including individualized academic support, tech coaching, and tutoring, the SALT Center serves approximately 700 undergraduate, graduate, and international students each semester. 

The clinical population at SALT includes students who have a previous developmental, learning, or attention diagnosis (i.e., specific learning disorders, ADHD, ASD) with co-occurring anxiety, depression, adjustment disorders, OCD, attachment traumas, interpersonal difficulties, and more. The combination of developmental/learning challenges with other mental health disorders results in unique presentations and treatment considerations that SALT interns will become adept at treating over the course of the academic year.  

The secondary rotation primarily focuses on individual psychotherapy, wellness consultation services, and urgent care/risk assessments one day per week. Students are typically referred by their Learning Specialist (support staff responsible for supporting students’ academic performance) and represent a range of clinical presentations and mental health diagnoses consistent with a university population.

Assessment Rotation: Each intern will be required to spend one of the two Secondary Rotations conducting Psychological Evaluations. SAPIC’s goal is to meet the agency’s evaluation capacity while minimizing the administrative burden for interns associated with the evaluation process in this busy and complicated public health system, and to provide more focused training experiences. Faculty anticipate that interns will be matched, based on interest, training needs, prior experience, and supervision capacity into one of a few primary assessment areas: adult assessments, including Bariatric Surgery Assessment, Autism Spectrum Assessment, and ADHD evaluations. Child Evaluations tend to focus on ASD, ADHD, and differential diagnoses. When not performing assessments, interns may be invited to provide clinical training to new and ongoing staff (i.e., DSM-V, Cultural Competency, Trauma, and Best Practices). Trainings will be based on combining intern interests and areas of competence with requests that come through the training director. This rotation requires the intern and supervisor to identify how many assessments will be completed as part of the rotation.

APA Commission on Accreditation contact information: