Psychiatric education for primary care: a pilot study of needs of residents

The study reported here documents a variety of psychiatric educational needs of residents in internal medicine. By studying 150 medical outpatients, the authors found that 59 percent of the patients had probable emotional disorders, 48 percent suffered from significant symptoms of depression, negative life events and low social support were significantly associated with both probable emotional disorder and depressive symptoms, only 20 percent of the patient charts contained psychiatric diagnoses, 78 percent of the charts contained no mental status data, patients on the average could report only 56 percent of their diagnoses and 60 percent of their management plans, and 70 percent of the patients reported that they were not asked about personal problems. These results have formed the basis for a psychiatric educational program in internal medicine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and will serve as pretraining comparison data for the evaluation of outcome.