Why are our internships important?
Written by Kaitlyn Gaub, Communications Intern
When it comes to supporting statewide mental healthcare in Alaska, one question always hangs in the air: How do we keep providers here?
Alaska Behavioral Health is welcoming about a dozen new interns this August. Teaching the next generation of mental healthcare workers to provide comprehensive, evidence-based practices supports mental healthcare in Alaska for decades to come.
Joshua Arvidson, LCSW., Chief Operating Officer and clinician at Alaska Behavioral Health, is the lead faculty of the intern cohort. He shared how the internship program supports mental healthcare workers in Alaska.
“My experience has been that healthcare providers stay motivated and engaged if their patients get better, if they feel like what they’re doing really makes a difference, and so we train them to do that.” – Joshua Arvidson, COO
Read time: 4 minutes
Providing real-world experience for students
Interns at Alaska Behavioral Health work with patients and care teams to get hands-on experience.
“Coming here I was able to learn more skills and the application of those skills with the children and so it definitely expanded upon the education that I had with my degree.” – Hailey Holland MS, former intern and now child and family clinician.
Hailey says working with a supervisor during her internship was the most helpful.
“Generally, just the supervision hours… I could talk to my supervisor and just kind of explore my cases a little bit more and get just a deeper dive into what I’m doing and how I can apply different skills.”
The program supports interns in many ways, making it a well-rounded learning experience. Intern Savannah Henry added: “We have individual consultation, then we have team meeting and group consultation, and then we have a didactic meeting. So, you get so much information, it is so helpful”
Improving access to mental healthcare
While interns expand their skills, they also expand access to care for patients without health insurance, knocking down barriers for low-income patients to access mental health care. As Savannah explains, there’s an assessment process first:
“When an assessing clinician does an MHA, they take and they assess whether or not a client is intern appropriate, and then when those clients receive services from an intern, the services are pro bono, they don’t pay for an intern providing services to them. And that is like this unspoken access to services.” – Savannah Henry, intern and new clinician
The internship program breaks down barriers for students too.
“There’s been lots of opportunities. This has been a phenomenal experience. Lots of educating, lots of inputs from senior clinicians.” Savannah added.
“It’s not just a team, it’s our family … You get to know everybody from the CEO to the receptionist, it’s great.” – Mark Shimkus, former intern and current clinician.
Helping new clinicians find their niche
Interns also are able to switch between teams to settle into the area of care that fits them best. Whether its child and family, adult outpatient, partial hospitalization or any of the other areas, interns can settle into the practice that fits their professional goals. Mark took advantage of that; after interning in the adult outpatient clinic in Fairbanks, he was hired as a clinician for the partial hospitalization program:
“[At AKBH] it was very accepting for them to ask, okay, where do you want to go?” Shimkus said.
Savannah started out assisting with research and ended up co-authoring a research document on suicide intervention in adolescents. This was something she is very proud of and never thought possible when she started her internship.
Keeping mental healthcare workers in Alaska
Arvidson said that these experiences between interns and supervisors build loyalty and a foundation for their careers.
He added, “We are we are much more effective when we hire Alaskans than trying to recruit nationally … When you hire Alaskans, they’re much more likely to stick around.
Appropriate Care for Alaska clients
“It’s beneficial for the patient too because Alaskans have a huge head start on understanding culture and rural areas and all the diversity and all the things that are unique to Alaska. When you hire people who live here already, it’s just way better.” Arvidson said.
We work to support interns and patients in Alaska to ensure everyone receives the best care possible.
Alaska Behavioral Health hosts about 25 interns annually. You can find available internships and apply on the Student Internship Opportunities page on the Alaska Behavioral Health website.
