The way forward for undergraduate psychiatric education
19 May 2022
Last update: 20/05/22 08:54
The RCPsych Article of the Month for May is ‘Undergraduate psychiatric education: current situation and way forward’ and the blog is written by author Gaia Sampogna published in BJPsych International.
Nowadays it has been described a shortage of recruitment of medical students in psychiatry. This is a complex phenomenon, where multiple factors interact.
In this paper, we summarized the main issues related to the difficulties in the recruitment in psychiatry. Furthermore, we found that when medical students have positive experiences of teaching, elective placements and exposure to psychiatric wards, their attitudes to choosing psychiatry as a career significantly improve. Therefore, we argued that there was a need for improvement in the quality of undergraduate training courses in psychiatry. There is the need for innovative teaching strategies, such as use of movies, virtual reality, simulated patients and multiprofessional training wards. We really hope that in the near future all these strategies will really help to improve the recruitment rate in psychiatry among medical students.
Mental health services around the world are struggling to cope with the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, but they were already stretched because of underfunding and a shortage of appropriately trained staff. Our global expertise in psychiatry needs to be refreshed continuously by an influx of new talent from our medical schools, but a career in psychiatry is not a popular one among medical students. In our Article of the Month, an international consortium of authors discusses the challenges faced by undergraduate psychiatric education, and recommends that innovations in the way the subject is taught could provide a way forward.
David Skuse
Editor-in-Chief, BJPsych International
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