The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences offers a one-year Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Fellowship Program for two fellows per year, with each fellow spending six months based at UCSF and six months based the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC). This fellowship represents an exciting opportunity to gain expertise in inpatient and outpatient consultation-liaison (C-L) work, acquire advanced teaching and leadership skills, and develop research interests in an academic setting.
The UCSF Medical Center is a 600-bed tertiary and quaternary referral center that also serves as a community hospital. UCSF is distinguished by its integration of medical research and patient care, as well as by its opportunities for clinical training. SFVAMC is a 104-bed acute care center, with a 120-bed Community Living Center for rehabilitation and extended care, located at the picturesque Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay. The facility provides primary, secondary, and tertiary care for veterans throughout Northern California and is one of the main UCSF training sites. Our program values diversity and equity, and is committed to creating and sustaining an inclusive learning environment in all settings that involve fellows.
Fellows perform consultation and liaison activities in both inpatient and outpatient settings, including primary care and women’s clinics. The schedule is approximately 50% inpatient and 50% outpatient at both UCSF and SFVAMC. Fellows have the opportunity to work alongside psychiatry and neurology residents, geriatric and addiction psychiatry fellows, nurse practitioners, and social workers to provide formal consultation, triage, liaison services, short-term psychopharmacologic treatment, and individual psychotherapy. In addition to the general outpatient psychiatric consultation-liaison experience, fellows may choose to develop a liaison focus in a specialty area of interest; potential areas include infectious disease, oncology, movement disorders, epilepsy, addiction, geriatrics, women’s health, organ transplantation, sleep medicine, and bariatric surgery.
Fellows teach medical students, psychiatry residents, and psychiatric nurse practitioner residents in the consultation-liaison setting, with the goal of enhancing further development of leadership and administrative skills. Throughout the year, fellows are able to take advantage of both informal and formal opportunities for learning, including clinical case conferences and discussions, elective seminars, and core didactics in consultation-liaison, addiction, and geriatric psychiatry. Fellows may also engage in elective scholarly activity; UCSF is the top-funded academic institution by the National Institutes of Health and SFVAMC runs the largest funded research program in the Veterans Health Administration system.
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