The activity includes working with schools and kindergartens on attachment issues and generating a publication at the end of the process.

Cynthia Ossa, Sofía Becerra, Nelly Astudillo, Jezabel Carvajal, María Valentina Olivier, Daniela Garagay, Valery Olivares and Víctor Sierra are the interns at the Center for Psychological Care and Comprehensive Health (CAPSI) of the University of La Serena this second semester. All of them are future psychologists of this house of higher education, those who began this transcendental stage of their professional training a few weeks ago.

The young people will carry out their internship until the end of December, with 23 hours per week distributed in patient care, clinical management (review of documents, psychometric tests, preparation of sheets, etc.), workshop (comprehensive health promotion and prevention) and one hour of field work. Their activities are varied and this year they will also have a special opportunity, to be part of an initiative related to parenting skills, a participatory research pilot in the CAPSI with competency workshops for parents of preschoolers, where there will be a pre- and post-intervention evaluation.

Two schools and two kindergartens would be the participants and the actions will include one or both parents. With them, topics such as parenting and attachment will be addressed and the practicing psychologists are already deepening their knowledge in these subjects, with the help of their career professors and the person in charge of the initiative, in addition to collecting and reviewing data. The workshops will be carried out by young people in pairs, covering different aspects each time.

Although these actions in the field of parental skills are not new in the CAPSI, since each year they are addressed according to the requirements of the community and institutions, this time they emerge as a proposal from the Center itself, with greater emphasis on research and the opportunity, once the work is completed, to be able to publish it.

Fernanda Castillo, general coordinator of CAPSI and in charge of this initiative, explains that, since its origins, the Center has provided patient care and the practitioners also perform it. Particularly about this initiative, she details that “we are in the phase of collecting data, reviewing. So, in the meeting spaces that we have on Tuesdays, we socialize the information we have and we make decisions to put together this proposal", which would be applied in the months of October and November, to be analyzed in December and generate the document to be published. .

Practitioners have 4 hours per week to work on this project, which will be carried out in group mode, integrating “the two areas of CAPSI, individual clinical work and the health prevention line and working with groups. This complements the spaces with the diversity of patients and the possibility of working with groups,” adds Castillo.

Cynthia Ossa is happy about this professional practice since, “on the one hand, we can learn many clinical elements of our career, emphasizing therapeutic aspects and, on the other, we have a direct link with the community in which we are inserted. Networks also influence, the possibility of going to schools, kindergartens, being nourished by teachers and parents gives us a more enriched perspective.”

Meanwhile, Víctor Sierra emphasizes the complementarity of these areas that they will be able to learn about, since, although at CAPSI the largest population they serve is children and adolescents, “we can perceive and recognize that many of the reasons why they come are due to because there are deficiencies in the area of ​​parental skills or competencies. So, researching this also gives us another point of view.”  

Regarding the clinical area, practitioners work with new patients (admissions) and some of them must, on certain occasions, continue the work of previous therapists (liaisons). They also collaborate in the management and organization of events, which they see as a good way to strengthen their networks and develop soft skills. It is important to mention that the opportunity to be part of network actions, for example, in the initiatives carried out in conjunction with the Council for Children and Adolescents of Coquimbo, is also available to the Student Centers of the Nursing and Psychology Programs ULS, joining workshops and meetings, where their participation is very well considered.

Regarding research, the CAPSI coordinator maintains that “investigating and knowing is always present, regardless of the area. You always have to be investigating, updating yourself. Perhaps the topic of producing products, publications or other types of physical products could be more oriented to the academic field, which is also a potential future job area.” Furthermore, Fernanda Castillo highlights the importance that this pilot initiative that the practitioners will develop will have in their training in research methodology, being part of an instance of these characteristics from beginning to end.