A model community psychiatry curriculum for psychiatric residents

The ability of mental health practitioners to work well with persons with serious long-term mental illness has expanded significantly over the past two decades. Learning to do this well involves acquiring a broad base of knowledge and a complex range of skills. Such knowledge and experience must be incorporated into the basic residency curriculum for general psychiatrists, though with some notable exceptions this has not occurred for a number of important reasons, including money and the new image that psychiatry is trying to assume. The key elements of such a curriculum include 1) specific learning goals, 2) working within an effective treatment system with high quality clinical rotations, 3) good role models, 4) high quality psychiatric supervision, 5) a well-grounded didactic program, and 6) high quality clinical rotations. We discuss these elements in detail, and we describe the training program in community psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School Department of Psychiatry. Our residency training program and supervising faculty are affiliated with and partially funded by the Mental Health Center of Dane County to the benefit of both. This marriage between the public-sector mental health care provider and the academic psychiatric training program has created benefits for both parents plus a fertile environment for training future generations of psychiatrists.