The Blueprint for building psychology into a health care profession: Retaining our foundation in science while expanding breadth of training.

Abstract

The Blueprint for Health Service Psychology Education and Training represents an important step in defining as a health profession. Although we face many challenges in positioning our profession prominently within the emerging health care system, two issues highlighted in this article are paramount. First, it is important for to retain its emphasis on training health service psychologists (HSPs) to conduct research, not just to consume research, a feature of our profession that distinguishes us from all other health professions. Second, programs that train HSPs need to revise their curricula to assure that graduates possess the competencies needed to function within the health care system, particularly those involving interdisciplinary functioning and exposure to knowledge bases of other health disciplines. In highlighting this broader set of competencies required for effective practice as HSPs, the Blueprint provides a framework for positioning as a health care profession. Descartes (1641/1903) was wrong. Unfortunately, it took us over 350 years to learn this, and in the meantime, we managed to create a health care system in which medical and psychological disorders are diagnosed using different nomenclatures, paid for and managed differentially by health insurance payers, and in which behavioral health care providers are trained in educational programs that rarely interact with members from other health care professions. Recognizing the dysfunction created by the Cartesian separation of mind and body, the American Psychological Asso- ciation (APA) voted overwhelmingly in 2001 to redefine psychol- ogy as a health profession by adopting the mission of advancing psychology as a science and profession and as a means of pro- moting health (emphasis added) and human welfare (Anderson, 2003). Expanding as a health profession continues to be a unifying goal of the APA and is currently one of its three strategic initiatives. Although well over a decade has passed since clarified its vision as being a health profession, very little change has occurred in training health service psychologists (HSPs) to assure they have the essential competencies to function in the modern health care environment. In my view, we continue to squabble among ourselves regarding the best methods for training psychologists who desire to become HSPs, we license those who complete training programs of questionable quality, and we get paid poorly for working with some of the most challenging pa- tients who seek health care. Although our field owns a vision of becoming a health profession, the pathway to achieve it has not always been clear. With the Blueprint for Health Service Psychol- ogy Education and Training (Blueprint), (Health Service Psychol- ogy Education Collaborative (HSPEC), 2013), we now have the floor plans for moving our profession into a prominent role in our nation's emerging health care system. Even the casual reader will observe that as renovation of our profession occurs using the Blueprint, significant modification to what HSPs do and how they are trained needs to occur. Although there are many features of the Blueprint that warrant attention, I would like to concentrate on two of them: (a) the importance of conducting research versus con- suming science, and (b) the need to break down the boundaries that have kept isolated from all of the other health profes- sions.