Improving Psychiatric Teaching and Recruitment

Abstract

The authors report on a survey of medical school departments of psychiatry, addressing problems of and solutions to decreasing psychiatric recruitment. Seventy-two respondents indicated that the most productive initiatives are to improve medical student education using the demonstrated commitment of senior professors, giving students maximal patient care responsibility during their clerkships, utilizing small group teaching in the pre-clinical years, offering opportunities for social contacts between students and faculty, assigning teaching to psychiatrists instead of other mental health faculty, and most importantly, commitments by the chairmen of the departments to giving medical student education a major priority assignment. Psychiatrists’ commitment to and participation in medical student education is, above all, responsible for more effective, engaging instruction and ultimate enhancement of recruitment.

Programmatic changes over a six-year period at the University of Cincinnati are described that led to more responsive undergraduate teaching activities and to a more than doubling of the number of students entering psychi- atry residencies.