Section 4 -- Activities, Privileges, and Benefits

Tables 4-9 depict the activities, privileges, and benefits of psychologists within medical school settings, many of which varied depending on department type. In terms of the collective percentage of time across all departments devoted to medical school activities (see Table 4), the single largest proportion was spent conducting research (30%). Clinical services followed at 25%, 15% was devoted to teaching, and 10% was allocated for administrative tasks.

As depicted in Table 5 and Table 6, a large number of psychologists were involved in training. Slightly more than half of the medical school departments/colleges supported pre-doctoral internships (50.8%) and post-doctoral fellowships (53%) in psychology. In several instances, departments did not provide opportunities for training in psychology at the predoctoral and/or postdoctoral levels. For those departments that did not offer a predoctoral internship program in psychology, 40% of the psychologists have the opportunity to train these students elsewhere within the medical school and 7% were involved in training at another institution. Similarly, 21% of psychologists train postdoctoral fellows outside their primary departments but within the medical school and 4% train fellows at another institution.

Table 7 shows that psychologists reported that they were mostly responsible for training medical students (54%) and psychology students (52%). Only a modest number of psychologists taught nursing students (6%), physician's assistant students (3%), or dental students (3%). Forty-nine percent of the psychologists indicated that they were responsible for training students other than those in the categories listed. Closer inspection of the data indicated that these students in the "other" category consisted mostly of psychiatry residents.

Overall, 56% of the psychologists in medical schools were on the medical staff or were members of the medical staff within their departments, compared to 36% who did not have official membership status (see Table 8). About nine percent of the respondents did not specify whether they were members of the medical staff. Although over half of the psychologists were official members of the medical staff, only 21% acknowledged that they receive full privileges as members and about 12% did not specify the extent of their privileges. Of those 56% of psychologists on the medical staff or who were members of the medical staff within their departments, 87% were not authorized to admit patients, 64% were not permitted to write patient orders, 37% could not participate in the voting process, and 5% had some other type of restriction. In particular, psychologists who were employed in departments of family/ community/health/prevention, pediatrics, and psychiatry and behavioral sciences were less likely to receive full privileges.

The majority of psychologists in medical school settings enjoyed the benefit of having their employer incur the cost of malpractice insurance. Specifically, as shown in Table 9, 61% of medical school psychologists have employer-paid coverage, 24% did not have coverage paid by their employer, and 14% did not specify whether their employer covered malpractice insurance costs.

Table 4: Time Devoted to Medical School Activities by Department Type

Table 5: Predoctoral Internship Training in Medical School Departments

Table 6: Postdoctoral Fellowship Training in Medical School Departments

Table 7: Type of Students Trained by Medical School Psychologists by Department Type

Table 8: Medical Staff Privileges of Medical School Psychologists by Department Type

Table 9: Malpractice Insurance Coverage of Medical School Psychologists by Department Type

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