The Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) is an affiliated teaching facility located at the southern edge of the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area (more info
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It provides comprehensive inpatient, primary, secondary, and tertiary care in medical, surgical, neurological, rehabilitative, and short-term psychiatric modalities, primary and specialized ambulatory care and rehabilitative care. It has a current inpatient capacity of 237 acute care and 104 extended care beds. A new inpatient Spinal Cord Injury Program building is scheduled to open in 2008. This medical center is often described as a "flagship" and "center of excellence" in the VA system, with numerous specialized programs available and state of the art equipment.
The Minneapolis VAMC provides health care to veterans residing in our primary service area, which includes Western Wisconsin and Minnesota. It also serves as a tertiary referral center for the upper VA Midwest Healthcare Network which spans a much greater geographical area and includes some two million veterans. Last fiscal year, there were 569,538 outpatient visits, 8,099 inpatient stays, and 878 extended care stays at this facility. Each of the outpatient visits may represent multiple encounters with multiple departments on the same day; hence, there are more than a million patient encounters yearly. The Minneapolis VAMC is one of four officially designated Lead Polytrauma Centers receiving and treating returning veterans with multiple traumatic injuries sustained in the course of the current conflict. Additionally, this medical center is one of eight in the VA system that houses a Women Veterans Comprehensive Health Center and the first VA to provide mammography for female veterans. Over 3,000 women are seen in this medical center annually.
In addition to the Psychology Training Programs, The Minneapolis VAMC has one of the largest education and training programs in the VA system, with more than 1,500 students rotating through annually. It has active affiliations with 50 colleges, universities, and vocational schools in allied health professions, such as medicine, psychiatry, health care administration, audiology, speech pathology, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social work, psychology, laboratory and dental technology, physician assistants, nursing, and pharmacy. The Minneapolis VAMC has particularly strong partnerships with the University of Minnesota in providing clinical services, training, and research across a variety of disciplines.
The Presence of Psychology at the Minneapolis VAMC
The VAMC Psychology staff currently consists of 56 doctoral psychologists, nearly all of whom hold clinical faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and are involved in training. Each psychologist works in one or more of the specialized treatment units and acts as a member of a multidisciplinary treatment team and/or as a consultant to programs within that setting. The Psychology staff hold a diversity of interests, theories, and techniques in psychology and work in widely-varied programs with different kinds of patients. The training staff train eight interns yearly – five are in our general psychology track and two in the Neuropsychology track. There are also four postdoctoral residents, three in clinical psychology (SPMI, Rehabilitation/Polytrauma, and Mental Health/Primary Care emphases) and one in Clinical Neuropsychology. Five psychology technicians and three secretaries complete the staffing.
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The Training Setting