Are summer schools a way to improve recruitment in psychiatry?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: O'Brien A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8111968 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Are summer schools a way to improve recruitment in psychiatry?
BJPsych bulletin 20210401 2
Summer schools are traditionally used to encourage sixth form students to consider a career in medicine. Is it worth attracting students earlier in their school career, concentrating on psychiatry? Wyke et al describe an innovative project attempting to do just that. ...[more]
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Project description:This article highlights key findings from a recent Royal College of Psychiatrists project showing that many UK medical schools are embracing the dual challenge of raising students' interest in psychiatry and ensuring that all doctors can support patients with mental illness. It focuses on two novel approaches to boosting recruitment into psychiatry: I'm a Medic Get Me Out of Here, an online outreach activity enabling schoolchildren to ask questions of health professionals in real time; and a living library, which creates a safe space for dialogue where topics are discussed openly between human books (professionals) and readers (undergraduate students) to challenge stereotypes. It is recommended that sharing these and other examples of good practice will help all medical schools encourage recruitment in psychiatry more widely.
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Project description:This study investigates whether publicly funded summer school programs in secondary education are of substantive meaning for the math performance of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. More specifically, we explore whether this is the case when the summer programs are not explicitly aimed at low-SES students. In this context, we investigate whether summer schools in the Netherlands can decrease inequalities of opportunities in education. We use administrative data from Dutch secondary schools. To analyse the effect of the intervention we apply a Difference-in-Difference analysis in combination with matching estimation techniques. The results indicate that there is an overall modest effect of participation in a summer school. When analysing the SES groups separately, we observe a positive effect of participation for all three SES groups. However, the effect seems less strong for participants in the lowest and middle SES group compared to the highest SES group.
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Project description:Aims and methodThis study evaluated a pilot psychiatry summer school for GCSE students in terms of participant experience, effects on attitudes to mental illness and perception of psychiatry as a career option. This was done using the Community Attitudes towards the Mentally Ill scale, career choice questionnaires and a discussion group following the week-long programme attended by 26 students.ResultsStudents were significantly more likely to choose psychiatry after the summer school (P = 0.01). There were statistically significant changes in scores for social restrictiveness (P = 0.04) and community mental health ideology (P = 0.02). Qualitative analysis generated four themes: variation in expectations, limited prior knowledge, perception of the summer school itself and uniformly positive attitudes to psychiatry after the summer school.Clinical implicationsTargeting students at this early stage appears to be an underexplored positive intervention for improving both attitudes towards mental illness and recruitment to psychiatry.
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Project description:Disrupted interoception is a prominent feature of the diagnostic classification of several psychiatric disorders. However, progress in understanding the interoceptive basis of these disorders has been incremental, and the application of interoception in clinical treatment is currently limited to panic disorder. To examine the degree to which the scientific community has recognized interoception as a construct of interest, we identified and individually screened all articles published in the English language on interoception and associated root terms in Pubmed, Psychinfo, and ISI Web of Knowledge. This search revealed that interoception is a multifaceted process that is being increasingly studied within the fields of psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and biomedical science. To illustrate the multifaceted nature of interoception, we provide a focused review of one of the most commonly studied interoceptive channels, the cardiovascular system, and give a detailed comparison of the most popular methods used to study cardiac interoception. We subsequently review evidence of interoceptive dysfunction in panic disorder, depression, somatic symptom disorders, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa. For each disorder, we suggest how interoceptive predictions constructed by the brain may erroneously bias individuals to express key symptoms and behaviors, and outline questions that are suitable for the development of neuroscience-based mental health interventions. We conclude that interoception represents a viable avenue for clinical and translational research in psychiatry, with a well-established conceptual framework, a neural basis, measurable biomarkers, interdisciplinary appeal, and transdiagnostic targets for understanding and improving mental health outcomes.
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Project description:Aims and methodEducation leads for undergraduate psychiatry in UK medical schools completed questionnaires on adaptations made to undergraduate psychiatry education, their impact and what lessons could be learnt for the future.ResultsRespondents from 24 medical schools across the UK reported a major shift to online teaching delivery, with reduced workplace learning and increased use of teleconferencing, online tasks and self-directed learning. Changes were implemented with some faculty training provided, but little additional funding or resources from medical schools or National Health Service trusts. A variety of challenges and opportunities were reported.Clinical implicationsDespite the extraordinary efforts of education leads to maintain undergraduate psychiatry education, the pandemic may affect the development of students' professional competencies and recruitment into psychiatry. Individual clinicians, trusts and medical and foundation schools have much to offer, and need to work with students to replace what has been lost during the pandemic.
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Project description:The goal of the Young Scientist Program (YSP) at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WUSM) is to broaden science literacy and recruit talent for the scientific future. In particular, YSP seeks to expose underrepresented minority high school students from St. Louis public schools (SLPS) to a wide variety of careers in the sciences. The centerpiece of YSP, the Summer Focus Program (SFP), is a nine-week, intensive research experience for competitively chosen rising high school seniors (Scholars). Scholars are paired with volunteer graduate student, medical student, or postdoctoral fellow mentors who are active members of the practicing scientific community and serve as guides and exemplars of scientific careers. The SFP seeks to increase the number of underrepresented minority students pursuing STEM undergraduate degrees by making the Scholars more comfortable with science and science literacy. The data presented here provide results of the objective, quick, and simple methods developed by YSP to assess the efficacy of the SFP from 2006 to 2013. We demonstrate that the SFP successfully used formative evaluation to continuously improve the various activities within the SFP over the course of several years and in turn enhance student experiences within the SFP. Additionally we show that the SFP effectively broadened confidence in science literacy among participating high school students and successfully graduated a high percentage of students who went on to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors at the undergraduate level.
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Project description:BackgroundSeveral lines of evidence indicate that medical schools have been failing to adequately nurture empathy and the ethical dimension in their graduates, the lack of which may play a central role in the genesis of medical errors, itself a major source of avoidable deaths, incapacity and wasted resources. It has been widely proposed that medical schools should adopt evaluation strategies as a means to promote a culture of respectful relationships. However, it is not clear if evaluation strategies in medical schools have addressed key domains related to that aim, such as ethics, through the perspective of their students. Hence, we conducted a national survey of instruments used by Brazilian medical schools to assess clerkship rotations from the perspective of students, with a main focus on the ethical domain.MethodsThe authors invited 121 randomly selected institutions to participate in the study. Key informants answered a questionnaire about clerkship rotations and sent copies of any instrument used to assess the quality of clerkship rotations according to the students' perspectives.ResultsTwenty-six (53%) of 49 participating schools used an instrument to assess the quality of clerkship rotations according to the perspective of students. Just 13 (27%) schools had instruments containing at least one question encompassing the ethical domain. Only 2 (4%) schools asked students specifically about the occurrence of any negative experience concerning the ethical domain during rotations. Merely 1 (2%) school asked students about having witnessed patient mistreatment and none asked about mistreatment against students themselves.ConclusionsThere are several missed opportunities in the way medical schools assess the quality of clerkship rotations regarding the ethical domain. Closing the gap between usual institutional discourses regarding ethics and how that dimension is assessed within clerkship rotations might represent an important step towards the improvement of medical education and healthcare systems.
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Project description:BackgroundSurveillance tools to estimate viral transmission dynamics in young populations are essential to guide recommendations for school opening and management during viral epidemics. Ideally, sensitive techniques are required to detect low viral load exposures among asymptomatic children. We aimed to estimate SARS-CoV-2 infection rates in children and adult populations in a school-like environment during the initial COVID-19 pandemic waves using an antibody-based field-deployable and non-invasive approach.MethodsSaliva antibody conversion defined as ≥ 4-fold increase in IgM, IgA, and/or IgG levels to five SARS-CoV-2 antigens including spike and nucleocapsid constructs was evaluated in 1509 children and 396 adults by high-throughput Luminex assays in samples collected weekly in 22 summer schools and 2 pre-schools in 27 venues in Barcelona, Spain, from June 29th to July 31st, 2020.ResultsSaliva antibody conversion between two visits over a 5-week period was 3.22% (49/1518) or 2.36% if accounting for potentially cross-reactive antibodies, six times higher than the cumulative infection rate (0.53%) assessed by weekly saliva RT-PCR screening. IgG conversion was higher in adults (2.94%, 11/374) than children (1.31%, 15/1144) (p=0.035), IgG and IgA levels moderately increased with age, and antibodies were higher in females. Most antibody converters increased both IgG and IgA antibodies but some augmented either IgG or IgA, with a faster decay over time for IgA than IgG. Nucleocapsid rather than spike was the main antigen target. Anti-spike antibodies were significantly higher in individuals not reporting symptoms than symptomatic individuals, suggesting a protective role against COVID-19.ConclusionSaliva antibody profiling including three isotypes and multiplexing antigens is a useful and user-friendlier tool for screening pediatric populations to detect low viral load exposures among children, particularly while they are not vaccinated and vulnerable to highly contagious variants, and to recommend public health policies during pandemics.
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