Learners at the Rees-Jones Center: Training the next generation of providers

If you’ve had an appointment at our clinic, it’s likely you saw a student, resident or fellow working alongside our team members. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to host students receiving their education in pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, nursing and much more.

Each year, our team hosts students, whom we refer to as “Learners”. It is our privilege to help train the next generation of medical and behavioral health providers, nurses, and allied health professionals on what it means to work with families who have experienced trauma. When you visit our clinic, you will meet various medical students, pre-medical students, residents, and nurse practitioner students who are passionate about learning how they can help the foster care community through trauma-informed healthcare. For our medical students, we often have them see patients on their own first and then they present their plan to our provider. They debrief and make edits if needed, and then the student and provider return to the exam room to review the treatment recommendations. Working with students also helps us to stay up to date on the latest changes to medical guidelines and new treatments to ensure we are passing on the most current information. Their presence helps us to consistently be thinking of how we can better teach medicine to students and how we can best communicate with our patients and families.

This academic year, we have had students in clinic for pediatric residency, several nurse practitioner students, many foster care elective students from the medical school, and, new to our program, a rotation of residents doing a triple board fellowship in psychiatry and pediatrics. In addition, we also regularly have nursing students in clinic who learn how to administer vaccines, give medications, and do other testing to help clinical flow.

Within behavioral health, we have had a number of students and fellows working alongside our behavioral health providers to learn about our trauma-informed, evidence-based practices. Our psychiatrist, Dr. Khan, is teaching the next generation of pediatric psychiatrists in helping to alleviate the trauma-related stressors, anxiety, depression, and behavioral difficulties we often see in foster care and that have become increasingly prevalent post-pandemic. With Dr. Khan, these students learn to manage complex medication regimens while coordinating with behavioral supports (therapy, education plans, etc.).

Every year, we have had a psychology fellow – an individual completing a year of supervised training after completing a PhD – rotate through our clinic. This year, we have Dr. Panthee. She has already made a lasting impact on our patients through therapy and on our own clinic staff with her work focused on preventing and recognizing secondary traumatic stress! We also have students aiming to be clinical therapists who work closely with our behavioral health team to learn Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), and Parent Child CARE (PC-CARE). These students work alongside our behavioral health providers to learn skills for their own future practice while also completing a project to support our patients; we currently have an Early Childhood Student Intern, Dylan, who has been integral in a caregiver resource project that we hope to share with our patient families soon.

In addition to our medical and behavioral health students, we train allied health students who learn through our clinic’s research, advocacy, and policy work. These students from various programs partner with our administrative team, and our providers, to help us with projects and publications focused on information and data collection and collaboration related to child welfare. In the past few years, we have had some amazing students come through our program, so we wanted to be sure to mention Lauren, who recently defended her dissertation, and Tanisha, who is now in her postdoc program at Stanford.

For all of our students, we are so proud and honored to be a part of their education journey and thank them for investing in our families with their passion for quality compassionate, healthcare. To the families that visit our clinic, thank you for being an integral part of this training and helping to train the next generation of medical professionals.

To learn more about our clinical education program, please visit our website or email reesjonescenter@childrens.com with questions.