5.1  Facilitators of telepsychology deployment
For all these reasons, our faculty supervisors made the decision in the early going of the pandemic to begin an immediate transition to telepsychology services across all of our 12 primary care training sites. We were aware it was going to be a large undertaking because of the large number of clinics, each with its own culture and response to COVID‐19, but we had several advantages going for us. First, we are a very large program with 17 funded trainees and five faculty supervisors funded for part of their time. With mandated in‐person clinical work suspended immediately (by the both the clinics and the university) and our university closed for 2 weeks, we were able to bring to bear a tremendous amount of person power toward drafting the start‐up plans. That allowed us to have separate teams for each site to establish new procedures for contacting, consenting, and scheduling patients who were shifting to exclusive telepsychology services. Second, because one of our HRSA‐funded grants had mandated that we add a telepsychology service and training program that we had been working on for 6 months, we were already moving toward the training and policy changes necessary for the delivery of telepsychology. Third, we were able to leverage the online training created by our university clinic for their transition to telepsychology services. Each student was required to complete this self‐guided online training before seeing their first telepsychology patient. Last, we were fortunate enough to have several faculty supervisors with substantial prior experience as telepsychology clinicians, and in one instance, robust research and grant‐related experience in the area of telepsychology.