The Department of Clinical and Health Psychology is a unit of the College of Public Health and Health Professions of the University of Florida. Founded in 1853, the University of Florida has a long history of established programs in education, research, and service. It is one of only 17 public, land-grant universities that belong to the prestigious group of 62 institutions that comprise the Association of American Universities. With more than 50,000 students, including approximately 8,500 graduate and professional degree students, the University is the fourth largest in the nation. The University is a major teaching and research institution with more than 200 educational programs and extramural grant income exceeding $600 million per year.
The College of Public Health and Health Professions is one of six colleges (including Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Veterinary Medicine), which along with Shands Teaching Hospital and Clinics, comprise the University of Florida Health Science Center–the most comprehensive academic health science center in the southeastern United States. The UF Health Science Center is dedicated to high-quality programs of education, research, and clinical care. With a combined 996 licensed beds, UF Health Shands Hospital’s Gainesville facilities include UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital and UF Health Shands Cancer Hospital. It also operates the health system’s two specialty hospitals, UF Health Shands Rehab Hospital and UF Health Shands Psychiatric Hospital.”UF Health is a private, not-for-profit healthcare system affiliated with the University of Florida and its Health Science Center campuses in Gainesville and Jacksonville. The system includes eight Shands hospitals and two home-health agencies. Shands is affiliated with more than 80 UF outpatient practices located throughout North Central and Northeast Florida.
UF Health Shands Hospital is a leader for healthcare referrals in the state of Florida and the healthcare system is widely respected among healthcare practitioners in the Southeastern US. UF and community physicians on our medical staff provide care in more than 100 specialty and sub-specialty medical areas, from primary care to highly complex care including cancer, cardiovascular, neurological/neurosurgery and transplantation services. Patients come to us from every county in the state, throughout the nation and from more than a dozen countries.The Department of Clinical and Health Psychology operates the Psychology Clinic, which provides comprehensive psychological services to outpatients in the greater Gainesville community and to patients of Shands Teaching Hospital. The Psychology Clinic serves as the primary training site for the Psychology Internship Program. Between 10/1/2014 and 10/31/2015 there were a total of 15,377 outpatient visits and 1929 inpatient visits. Of these totals, 5.572 outpatient visits and 418 inpatient visits were seen by interns under the supervision of faculty members.
The Psychology Internship Program is one of two APA-approved training programs within the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology. In addition to the internship program, the Department also has a doctoral training program in clinical psychology. The Department receives funding from the State of Florida to support its educational mission, and it has enjoyed a long history of strong institutional support for the missions of doctoral education and internship training in clinical psychology. Indeed, the Psychology Internship Program, which has been accredited by APA continuously since 1963, represents an integral part of the mission of the Department, the College, and the Health Science Center. The Internship Program has received strong support at each of these levels for its training mission. This support has manifested itself in the substantial commitments of faculty time, space allocation, and administrative and financial resources provided by the Department, the College, and the Health Science Center.
The administrative structure of the Psychology Internship Program is unique among those situated in academic health science centers. Our program resides in an independent Department of Clinical and Health Psychology rather than in a Department of Psychiatry, the more common location of psychology internship programs in academic health sciences centers. The Chairman of the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology is Glenn E. Smith, Ph.D., ABPP-cn.
Responsibility for the training of interns is shared by 22 faculty members who serve as clinical training supervisors and by a number of other faculty who contribute to the program through educational and didactic offerings. Virtually all of our faculty participate in the clinical, research, and educational mission of the Department, and thus reflect and model the scientist-practitioner tradition on a day-to-day basis. Major decisions regarding the internship, including overall evaluations of program performance and intern progress, are made collectively by the faculty. The Director of the Psychology Internship Program is Lori Waxenberg, Ph.D., ABPP.