by Tom Rodebaugh, Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Since the Summit, the Planning Committee has been working on how to move the work of the Summit out into the world. (See Cindy Yee-Bradbury’s description of the background of the Summit for more details about the planning committee.) I am happy to provide my own perspective on this work and where it is headed.
One of my key take-aways from the Summit is that many people have been trying to make progress on improving clinical science training for a long time, often working without acknowledgment and against difficult headwinds. Our hope is that the Summit can help make forward movement easier, in part by helping the clinical science community see more clearly what the challenges and opportunities are.
Accordingly, the first step has been to get the word out about the Summit and all that was discussed there. We made video recordings of all talks, as well as notes from all workgroups, available online (https://www.acadpsychclinicalscience.org/summitproceedings.html). We hope others will be as inspired as we were by the talks. We also hope that these proceedings will help anyone attempting to make progress on these issues: The workgroup notes provide an excellent foundation for moving forward on any of these topics.
Additional efforts to get the word out include talks at the Association for Psychological Science, and a presentation to the Coalition for Advancement and Application of Psychological Science (CAAPS) about the Summit. As I write this, the planning committee is working on a summary of the Summit proceedings to help introduce the Summit in an easily digestible format and guide people to the overall proceedings for more details. We expect to post this summary as a preprint and seek publication for it.
In addition to all of these efforts, we have also worked on understanding how the Summit went from the perspective of diverse stakeholders. Most Summit attendees completed a survey after their attendance that the planning committee reviewed carefully. In addition, many Summit attendees wrote down and handed in some actions they intended to take in their own programs, and the planning committee has been discussing how we might best put these ideas to use.
One of the keys to the future of the Summit is for people to have a clear idea of how progress can be made. Progress will not be made by “The Summit,” or “Clinical Science,” or even the “Association for Psychological Clinical Science (APCS).” The Summit was an event that brought together key members of the clinical science community. The clinical science community is large, and no one person or organization “speaks for” the community or organizes it. APCS is an organizational unit representing a subset of the clinical science community, but by no means all of it. APCS has no structure or authority that allows it to dictate or require changes to its member programs, let alone the overall clinical science community.
Because this is the PCSAS newsletter, the reader might ask what PCSAS’s role is here. On the one hand, as an accreditation agency, PCSAS has the ability to set standards for accredited clinical science programs. However, PCSAS also generally takes the position that programs may take many different routes to the overall goal of training excellent clinical scientists. In addition, PCSAS does not speak for the clinical science community: They accredit clinical science programs.
Without a person or organization in clinical science with authority to speak for the entire community or dictate how programs should be run, how will progress be made? The key to progress will be individual clinical scientists committing to change locally and working with clinical scientists at other programs directly. APCS can help facilitate and promote such change, as can other organizations, such as CAAPS and the Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology (CUDCP), among others. Progress moving the themes of the Summit forward is likely to resemble a call and response between individual clinical scientists and their programs and such organizations. However, it is ultimately at the local level that change will need to take root and grow.
APCS, CUDCP, CAAPS, and hopefully other organizations are currently discussing and developing plans to promote change in the clinical science community. Some plans will likely be put forward by organizations in isolation, and others may involve these organizations partnering together. For example, APCS and CUDCP recently collaborated to hold a webinar in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that has challenged many programs as they look forward to reviewing graduate applications this year. This event included a panel of people from programs that had successfully maintained diversity in their programs despite an inability to consider applicants’ racial or ethnic identity due to state laws or local requirements that predated the recent national ruling. This panel provided consultation to programs that were uncertain about how to grapple with the ruling. The webinar thus directly addressed one of the key themes of the Summit. It also replicated aspects of the Summit on a smaller scale, in that it brought together clinical scientists such that those with knowledge and experience could share it with those who were just starting to grapple with a problem. Other initiatives moving forward will doubtless be a mix of those that react to current events and those that propose new ways forward on well-known problems.
It is premature to specify exactly what these initiatives will be. The hope of some Summit attendees that APCS provide a clear long term agenda and specify exactly how we would achieve certain outcomes was palpable toward the end of the Summit. I am confident, however, that if we had provided such a sweeping agenda as the Summit closed, it would have been a work of fiction, and probably a fanciful one. Clearly, we will need to write this story together to achieve our aims.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS).