The Consultation-Liaison (CL) Psychiatry Fellowship at UT Southwestern has been accredited since 2007 by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Our program aims to create leaders in CL Psychiatry in the areas of healing, education, and research.

We expect our graduates to work in diverse settings and with diverse populations, and therefore one of our aims is to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the field. We are committed to an atmosphere of support for our trainees that emphasizes their wellness, and we are committed to ensuring that the emphasis is on training needs.

Dr. Anne Louise Stewart and her husband celebrating Fellowship graduation in 2021.

The CL Psychiatry Fellowship at UT Southwestern will provide you the opportunity to practice psychiatry in a population with challenging comorbid psychiatric, neurologic, and medical illnesses. As life expectancy continues to increase and sociopolitical forces limit availability of quality mental health care in the community, this ever-increasing patient population will demand the expertise of CL psychiatrists. The CL Psychiatry Fellowship will supplement your general psychiatry training with a rich clinical experience and academic environment in which to develop skills in CL Psychiatry. As a CL Psychiatry fellow, you will provide leadership on interdisciplinary teams composed of medical and physician assistant (PA) students, residents, psychologists, psychology doctoral interns, and social workers; you will have daily opportunities to teach medical students and psychiatry residents, as well as residents in other medical specialties; and you will participate in quality improvement, patient safety, and scholarly activities.

Education and Training

We will provide formal supervision through daily teaching rounds and formal weekly didactics, as well as weekly CL teaching and case conferences, monthly CL journal club, and weekly departmental Grand Rounds. Countless other learning opportunities on campus include Ethics Grand Rounds, Effective Teachers Lecture Series, and teaching conferences in Combined Medicine/Psychiatry, Combined Neurology/Psychiatry, and Forensic, Addiction, and Geriatric Psychiatry.

Teaching medical students and physician assistant students and psychiatry residents will be an important part of fellowship training. You will be encouraged to develop specialized interests within CL Psychiatry and complete an academic or research project during your tenure with the fellowship program. Established clinical researchers throughout the Department of Psychiatry provide mentorship to the CL fellows.

Electives

• Parkland and Associated Clinics:
  • Bioethics with Dr. Jenna Wimberly
  • PsychoOncology with Dr. Diana Robinson
  • Ob/Women’s Health with Dr. Meitra Doty
  • Inpatient Addictions Psychiatry with Dr. Kapila Marambage
  • Psychiatry Early Assessment Team with Dr. Pedro Fernandez
  • Integrated Psychiatry-Family Medicine with Dr. Suselina Acosta
  • Integrated Psychiatry-Internal Medicine with Dr. Chandan Khandai
  • Diabetes with Dr. Suselina Acosta
  • HIV with Dr. Pedro Fernandez
  • Integrated Pain Management with Dr. Pedro Fernandez
• University Hospitals and Associated Clinics:
  • Obstetrics/Women’s Health with Dr. Jasmine Stephens
  • Neuropsychiatry/Geriatrics with Drs. Molly Camp and Chad Lane
  • Transplant with Dr. Ben Lippe
  • Outpatient Addictions Psychiatry with Dr. Sidarth Wakhlu
  • Psychiatry Emergency Medicine with Drs. Cate Orsak, Dennis Le, Mike Rafferty
• Dallas VAMC and associated clinics:
  • Mental Health - Primary Care Integration with Dr. Joel Baskin

Rotation Locations

Fellows gain exposure to diverse patient populations, reflecting a variety of ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds at UT Southwestern-affiliated hospitals, including Parkland, William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital, and the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The diverse patient population and opportunity to work with and learn from our large psychiatry faculty at these three teaching hospitals are strengths of our program.

Parkland is a publicly funded, 862-bed county hospital that opened in 2015. Parkland allows trainees to see patients on a variety of medical services and practice liaison care within the context of a large hospital system with a Level 1 Trauma Center, one of the largest civilian burn units in the United States, and one of the busiest obstetrics services in the nation. Fellows will work on the Addiction Psychiatry CL service and have opportunities for buprenorphine waiver training.

William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital  is a 460-bed university hospital that opened in 2014 as a state-of-the-art facility designed to be patient centered. A major expansion is planned to open in Fall 2020. The hospital is the inpatient home of the Peter O’Donnell Brain Institute and allows for consultation with neurology colleagues and their patients with complex, often rare, neurological conditions. UT Southwestern Transplant Services are based at this hospital, adding to the CL Psychiatry training opportunities, along with consultation to the medical, surgical, and obstetrics services and the Emergency Department.

Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center  is a vibrant academic medical center and part of the Veterans Administration (VA) North Texas Health Care System, which is the second largest VA in the US. It provides fellows with specialized CL clinical, research, and educational experiences in the Spinal Cord Injury Center and the Traumatic Brain Injury and Polytrauma centers, in addition to the medical and surgical units, Emergency Department, and Primary Care-Mental Health Integration outpatient clinics.

CL fellows have ambulatory care experiences in integrated/collaborative care in various outpatient clinical settings, such as diabetes, hematology-oncology, maternal fetal medicine, integrated internal medicine-psychiatry clinics, and integrated family medicine-psychiatry clinics.

CL fellows receive multiple opportunities to enhance their clinical, communication, leadership, and teambuilding skills as they serve a patient population at UT Southwestern that presents from a variety of backgrounds, speaks a variety of languages, and may present with extremely challenging and complicated medical, neurological, psychiatric, and social histories.