Post Doctoral Fellow – Boston Children’s Hospital Neighborhood Partnerships

For 14 years, the Boston Children’s Hospital Neighborhood Partnerships (BCHNP) program has placed social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists in schools and community health centers throughout urban neighborhoods of Boston to provide a comprehensive array of behavioral health services to children and adolescents where they live and learn.

The overall goals of BCHNP are 1) to increase access to children’s behavioral health services; 2) to promote children’s healthy social-emotional development; 3) to build the sustainable behavioral health capacity of partner organizations; 4) to promote systemic change in behavioral health service delivery; and 5) to provide services that achieve a high degree of satisfaction with all stakeholders.

BCHNP’s School-Based Program includes partnerships with public schools in Boston, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, Dorchester, and Roslindale, including elementary, K-8, middle, and high schools. In the 2015/2016 academic year, the BCHNP School-Based Program provided clinical, early intervention, and prevention/promotion services to nearly 1300 students, and provided over 600 hours of training and consultation to school staff and families, including seven workshops to 325 school staff. Family engagement and education is a critical component of BCHNP’s work in schools.

In 2015, BCHNP expanded its efforts to build the behavioral health capacity of partner schools through its launching of a new innovation, the Clough Foundation Training and Access Project (TAP), which aims to address students’ social, emotional, and behavioral health needs by supporting the development of sustainable systems to meet these needs. TAP provides high quality training and consultation in social-emotional development and behavioral health to school professionals across a two year partnership.

BCHNP Postdoctoral Training Opportunities:

BCHNP will accept one full-time/40 hour postdoctoral fellow this coming year. The postdoctoral fellow will be placed in a partner school site part-time/20 hours to implement clinical services, including short-term therapy, prevention focused group work, crisis intervention, staff training, and consultation to staff and families. The fellow will also take part in the Department of Psychiatry’s meetings and clinical training seminars as well as BCHNP team meetings. BCHNP staff will provide clinical supervision.

The fellow will also be part-time/20 hours with the BCHNP’s research and evaluation team. The research/evaluation team is in charge of the task of documenting the impact of clinical, prevention, and consultative services on the mental health status, academic performance, and additional outcomes of students in the BCHNP and TAP partner schools. In addition to supporting the work of evaluating community programming with this team, the fellow has the opportunity to be mentored in developing and implementing a quality improvement project based on his/her interests and skills.