Education and Training

Just as important as the MSAHCs services to the community are its contributions to the field of adolescent health-contributions that have an enormous impact upon untold numbers of lives.

Overview of MSAHC Training Programs

The MSAHC teaches both patients and healthcare professionals about best practices in adolescent health care. It provides technical assistance and mentoring to community-based organizations and youth-serving coalitions throughout the region to assist them in developing programs to prevent a range of health-risk behaviors. The MSAHC also offers health professionals and healthcare workers weekly seminars and individual mentoring on research topics.

The MSAHC manages many training programs at its facility each year. MSAHC staff including physicians, nurses, physician assistants, psychologists, administrators, health educators, and social workers serve as trainers and supervisors. Trainees include medical students from domestic and foreign medical institutions, residents, physicians from international clinics, and graduate students from programs including social work, psychology, health education, and health administration. MSAHC also runs a three-year, accredited Adolescent Medicine Fellowship program for physicians who have completed their residency and want to specialize in adolescent medicine. The MSAHC offers discipline specific training as well as interdisciplinary didactic seminars for all its trainees. Finally, MSAHC staff integrates mentoring into its medical student and resident training programs.

MSAHC offers training and mentoring for medical students at all stages of their medical school education. Medical students in training are from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and other medical schools in this country and abroad. First year students, who choose MSAHC for their semester-long elective, learn how to take comprehensive histories of patients and conduct physical exams. Second year students can also choose a semester-long elective at MSAHC, where they enhance their skills taking a history, making differential diagnoses, and learning how to develop treatment plans for patients. Fourth year medical students completing a four-week elective at MSAHC see their own panel of patients, with supervision, strengthen their skills taking histories, making diagnoses, and developing treatment plans, and learn about physical and reproductive health, gynecology, and psychosocial assessments. Their entire time is spent working closely with an interdisciplinary team of nurses, physician assistants, health educators, and social workers.

Pediatric residents at Mount Sinai Hospital need are required to complete a four week rotation at MSAHC. Their work includes strengthening their interaction with patients and their knowledge of adolescent health including reproductive health, cognitive and psychosocial growth, and issues of confidentiality and consent. Residents must research a topic to be completed and presented by the end of their rotation and are simultaneously mentored by an MSAHC physician.

MSAHC also runs one of the only ACGME-accredited, three-year Adolescent Medicine Fellowships in the country. The Fellowship is designed for individuals who have completed their residency in either pediatrics, internal medicine, medicine/pediatrics, or family practice. The intent of the program is to produce experts in the field of adolescent medicine, who often go on to pursue careers in academic settings or in private practice.

Since MSAHC is recognized for its model of providing health services to adolescents, physicians from other countries, including those from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, come to study MSAHC's service design and many return to their clinics and hospitals to implement an adolescent health services model based on MSAHC's. Similarly, MSAHC staff have traveled to other countries in the aforementioned continents to provide training, and help design new programs and re-design existing programs in clinics that provide adolescent and reproductive health services.

MSAHC staff provide one-year trainings to graduate students from Columbia School of Nursing, Columbia and Hunter School of Social Work, Health Education and Health Administration programs.

In addition, the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center provides a predoctoral psychology internship for two doctoral candidates in either Clinical or School Psychology PhD or PsyD programs. We are members of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) and fully abide by all of their policies.