Published in:
01-01-2018 | Innovation and Improvement: Innovations in Medical Education
Integration of Primary Care and Psychiatry: A New Paradigm for Medical Student Clerkships
Published in: Journal of General Internal Medicine | Issue 1/2018
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Background
Public health crises in primary care and psychiatry have prompted development of innovative, integrated care models, yet undergraduate medical education is not currently designed to prepare future physicians to work within such systems.
Aim
To implement an integrated primary care–psychiatry clerkship for third-year medical students.
Setting
Undergraduate medical education, amid institutional curriculum reform.
Participants
Two hundred thirty-seven medical students participated in the clerkship in academic years 2015–2017.
Program Description
Educators in psychiatry, internal medicine, and pediatrics developed a 12-week integrated Biopsychosocial Approach to Health (BAH)/Primary Care–Psychiatry Clerkship. The clerkship provides students clinical experience in primary care, psychiatry, and integrated care settings, and a longitudinal, integrated didactic series covering key areas of interface between the two disciplines.
Program Evaluation
Students reported satisfaction with the clerkship overall, rating it 3.9–4.3 on a 1–5 Likert scale, but many found its clinical curriculum and administrative organization disorienting. Students appreciated the conceptual rationale integrating primary care and psychiatry more in the classroom setting than in the clinical setting.
Conclusions
While preliminary clerkship outcomes are promising, further optimization and evaluation of clinical and classroom curricula are ongoing. This novel educational paradigm is one model for preparing students for the integrated healthcare system of the twenty-first century.