PRIME: Promoting Rigorous & Interdisciplinary Mental Healthcare Education

In this third year of the PRIME grant, the leadership team has been very successful at meeting its goals and objectives. Quantitative and qualitative analyses provide evidence that PRIME participants find the training's to be of value and are expanding their knowledge and skill set. There has also been good progress towards enhancing the curriculum, especially with the number of additional courses embedding PRIME topics and content. We do not have any major recommendations this year as the PRIME grant seems to be going along very well. Below are some key items to keep an eye on as the PRIME grant moves into its fourth and final year.

Items to Keep an Eye On:

• Curriculum There is excellent progress towards enhancing the curriculum – especially with the number of courses which have embedded PRIME topics and content. This is simply a note that the PRIME team should keep an eye on developing the inter-disciplinary three course electives, as that is slightly behind the proposed deadline.
  
  
• PRIME Alumni This would probably be a good time to consider whether the team would be interested in tracking the progress of PRIME alumni and if so, what they would be most interested in measuring. The team might consider following up with grant alumni in terms of employment, progress towards licensure, and knowledge and skills still being utilized from their time participating in PRIME.

DOWNLOAD 2023-24 PRIME GRANT ASSESSMENT AND DATA (PDF)

In this second year of the PRIME grant, the leadership team has been very successful at meeting its goals and objectives. Quantitative and qualitative analyses provide evidence that PRIME participants find the trainings to be of value and are expanding their knowledge and skill set. There has also been good progress towards enhancing the curriculum, especially with the number of additional courses embedding PRIME topics and content. Below are some key recommendations and items to keep an eye on as the PRIME grant moves into its second year.

Recommendation:

Communication and Community Faculty members, in particular, expressed feeling disconnected from the larger PRIME team members and participants. Several faculty members also indicated a wish for feedback on how well they’ve embedded PRIME topics and content into their courses. It should be noted that many faculty members who shared this concern are also adjunct faculty members. The PRIME grant’s goals are many, and there are many constituents – including faculty, students, and community partners. At this scale, it can be very difficult to bring everyone together and build a sense of community. We recommend the following action items (if not already implemented):

• A bi-weekly email update sent out to everyone – this email might also highlight a faculty, student, and community partner each week;
  
  
• Opportunities for faculty members embedding PRIME topics and content to gather together and discuss their pedagogical methods;
  
  
• Sharing of evaluation findings with the PRIME participants so that they have a sense of how things are progressing along.

Items to Keep an Eye On:

• Curriculum There is excellent progress towards enhancing the curriculum – especially with the number of courses which have embedded PRIME topics and content. This is simply a note that the PRIME team should keep an eye on developing the inter-disciplinary three course electives, as that is slightly behind the proposed deadline.
  
  
• Representation and Underserved Areas Going into the grant, the PRIME team was already very well-aware that diversifying the student participants was going to be a challenge. There has been some good progress made this second year, but there will need to continued progress in the third year. In addition, while good progress has been made towards placing the students at internship organizations that work in underserved areas, there will need to be more continued progress during the third year.
  
  

DOWNLOAD 2022-23 PRIME GRANT ASSESSMENT AND DATA (PDF)

Overall, in this first year of the PRIME stipend, the leadership team has been very successful at meeting its goals and objectives. Marketing materials have been developed, and members of the leadership team have met their goals in sharing information about the PRIME program. Quantitative and qualitative analyses provide evidence that PRIME participants find the trainings to be of value and are expanding their knowledge and skill set. There has also been good progress towards enhancing the curriculum, with one new interdisciplinary course and three courses incorporating experiential learning (one in Psychology and two in Social Work). Below are some key recommendations as the PRIME stipend moves into its second year.

• Webinar Trainings and Training Topics The leadership team has already modified the timing of the webinar trainings – with two in the Fall 2022 and two in the Spring 2023 semesters. Evaluation results show that participants found the telehealth trainings to be of great value and future trainings should continue to focus on that topic. Based on feedback on webinar attendees, community partners, and faculty, we would recommend two separate webinar trainings: one focused more narrowly on de-escalating aggression and violence in encounters with youth, and another focused more broadly on trauma-informed care. In particular, community partners expressed the need for interns and field placements to have a strong grasp of trauma-informed care (also see Appendix K for a more detailed report).
• Curriculum There is excellent progress towards enhancing the curriculum. The faculty incorporating experiential learning into their courses demonstrate a high level of reflective teaching and have already planned out modifications and improvement. There is really only one main recommendation here (which might or might not be feasible) – to provide faculty with more frequent reminders that they have agreed to participate in course creation and modification, and that they should do so in a timely manner.
• Data Collection and Evaluation There is agreement that the evaluation team will create a timeline for data collection and evaluation, which will also align tasks and responsibilities to team members. The leadership and evaluation team will review and modify this timeline together. This should hopefully make the process more streamlined and efficient for the 2022-2023 academic year.
  • The PRIME survey scales document the success of this stipend program in its first year, with participants self-reporting statistically significant improvements on almost all scales and subscales. While this is not written into the stipend proposal, it might be useful to conduct interviews with PRIME participants at the end of the academic year to gather more in-depth information on their opinions of how the program can be better modified and improved.

• PRIME Newsletter Spring 2024 (PDF)
• PRIME Newsletter Fall 2023 (PDF)