La Academia- As a model addressing workforce shortages in mental health, this interdisciplinary, experiential learning cohort demonstrates evidence of improved clinical skills and decreased burnout.

Proposal: Recent directions in behavioral health care point to the importance of employing culturally responsive approaches to reduce treatment disparities among minoritized populations. Despite this growing awareness, current training curricula are limited in their capacity to adequately prepare professionals to serve minoritized communities, including the Latine community which is now the largest minoritized population in this country. These limitations only expand as we focus on the growing needs of the Latine community.

At our community Latine mental health clinic, we have repeatedly encountered so-called “professional pipeline” issues whereby the number of early-career clinicians that are both bilingual and have specific training in evidence-based Latine mental health approaches is scarce. The resulting dynamic is often one where new clinicians feel overwhelmed by complex caseloads that increase burnout rates, decrease service quality, and maintain current mental health disparities among Latines.

In light of this, our clinic took an evidence-based pedagogical approach to developing a training curriculum, “La Academia” (LA), aimed at reducing training gaps among early-career practitioners to improve service provision quality. LA consists of learning activities during a clinician’s first year that function alongside client care responsibilities to provide scaffolded professional development opportunities. Leveraging both evidence-based Latine mental health approaches and empirically validated treatment adaptations, the curriculum balances didactic teaching sessions with experiential learning opportunities that provide space for integration and practical application of the skills and knowledge being taught.

Juan Prandoni (Ph.D, HSP) Training Director and Molly Hayes (LCMHCS) Director of Clinical Enhancement Services at El Futuro discuss the impacts of the evidence-based pedagogical approaches used in this training curriculum as well as a overview of mixed methods report of our evaluation of LA. Results show that the 17 participating clinicians experienced a range of positive impacts, including increased culturally responsive knowledge and skills, improved clinician confidence, reductions in self-reported burnout ratings, as well as increased workplace belongingness and job satisfaction. It is our hope that the La Academia curriculum serves as a model for future like-minded efforts aimed at addressing current training gaps that will improve service delivery.