Transforming neuroscience education in psychiatry

Clinical Neuroscience Education in Psychiatry Residency Training: Where Do We Go from Here?

ABSTRACT

The growing body of clinical neuroscience knowledge is transforming the psychiatry field. Today's psychiatrists must have strong command of clinical neuroscience and its applications to clinical practice. Over the past few decades, increased emphasis has been placed on clinical neuroscience education for psychiatrists and psychiatric trainees; residency training serves as a primary avenue for such educational intervention. These efforts, however, have been met with varying beliefs, attitudes, and responses. In this perspective, we examine the existing literature on clinical neuroscience education in North American psychiatry residency training programs as reported by department chairs, program directors, practicing psychiatrists, and trainees. We note key challenges, including perceived lack of clinical relevance in teaching, insufficient integration of clinical neuroscience education into residency training, and a shortage of specialized faculty educators. We summarize existing efforts to address these challenges, then propose future directions that may further advance clinical neuroscience education in psychiatric residency training. Such propositions include further developing longitudinal and integrated curricula, tailoring teaching for diverse learner and institutional needs, incorporating effective teaching methods, and continually collaborating across parties of interest.

Neuroscience Education: Making It Relevant to Psychiatric Training

Psychiatric education has struggled to move past dualistic notions separating mind from brain, and embrace the field's identity as a clinical neuroscience discipline. To modernize our educational systems, we must integrate neuroscience perspectives into every facet of our clinical work. To do this effectively, neuroscience education should be clinically relevant, informed by adult learning theory, and tailored to the individualized needs of learners. Classic neuropsychiatry skills can help us better understand our patients' brain function at the bedside. Integrating neuroscience perspectives alongside the other rich perspectives in psychiatry will help trainees appreciate the relevance of neuroscience to modern medical practice.

Bringing Neuroscience to the Bedside

Clinical psychiatry has not historically expected practitioners to learn the basic science of psychiatric illness. Despite wide recognition that all effective psychiatric treatments have neurophysiological mechanisms, the field has struggled to integrate concepts of the mind and brain. Because of historical separations of clinical psychiatry and evolving neuroscience research, many psychiatric residency programs feel underresourced to teach clinically relevant neuroscience, and current residency graduates are not being prepared to integrate neuroscience findings into their practice. Significant strides have been made in the understanding of the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders. Similarly, the neurobiological mechanisms of a wide variety of treatments have been elucidated, spanning interventions from psychotherapy to physical exercise, electroconvulsive therapy, and modern neuromodulation techniques. The authors discuss strategies for integrating the language of clinical neuroscience into everyday psychiatric practice and review resources available to clinicians and trainees to help them acquire and practice these skills.

Neuroanatomy education: The impact on perceptions, attitudes, and knowledge of an intensive course on general practice residents

General practitioners are responsible for the management of an increasing number of patients with neurological illness, and thus a solid education in neurosciences is a necessary component of their training. This study examines the effects of an intensive clinical neuroanatomy course on twenty general practice residents' perceptions, attitudes, and knowledge. A knowledge test was completed by the participants and by a control group at four different time points. The participants were asked to answer a questionnaire about their reasons for signing up for the course and their attitudes and perceptions toward the course experience. Experimental and control groups demonstrated identical mean baseline test scores. The experimental group significantly increased its test scores (plus 49.0% correct answers, a mean improvement of 120%) relative to controls after the educational intervention. There were no differences among scores from the evaluated time points after the educational intervention in the experimental group. In the control group, there were likewise no significant differences between the four evaluated time points. Most participants indicated that they signed up for the course to update/acquire knowledge and skills in the field of neurosciences, and also because they had difficulty in diagnosing and managing patients with neurological diseases. Participants' attitudes and perceptions toward the course experience were very positive. Most of the participants (n = 17; 85%) rated the course as "extremely useful," and 3 (15%) rated it as "very useful." This study provides evidence demonstrating the potential positive effect of neurosciences education to general practice residents. Anat Sci Educ 10: 465-474. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.