Research Day
Relevance of neuroscience seminar teaching to day-to-day clinical practice of psychiatry
Document Type
Abstract
Date
2017
Abstract
Introduction: In training psychiatry residents, there is an emphasis on getting the correct diagnosis and providing the most efficacious treatment. Over the past 10-20 years there has been an explosion of basic neuroscience research. Its application to psychiatry (translational medicine) has been slow. A survey of psychiatry residency training directors noted that only 39% of the programs felt that they had faculty with adequate training to teach on this area. A second study of residents showed that 13% felt that they had more than adequate or excellent knowledge of the topics of neuroscience and that they were relevant to their training. We are replicating a portion of their survey in our study. Just three years ago, the ACGME added training in neuroscience as a core curriculum requirement. This is an attempt to bring learner-centered teaching methods into the development of a new course in neuroscience for the second year psychiatry residents. Objective: The aim of this study is to understand the perceptions psychiatry residents have of the utility and relevance of neuroscience in their day-to-day practice as psychiatrists. It is also an attempt to demonstrate an effective method to teach neuroscience that could be generalized to other psychiatry training programs in the US. Materials and Methods: During the second year of training, the psychiatry residents have 14 sessions, 1.25 hours each, that cover concepts of neuroscience. The course began in January 2017 and will end in mid April 2017. We obtained IRB approval and gave the residents two surveys (pre-tests)—the first on specific content topics to be covered in the course and the second on perceptions of the relevance of neuroscience. A second set of surveys will be administered at the end of the course (post-tests). Data will be scored numerically. Each content topic will be scored from 1-4 (for level of comfort in each topic) and averaged (for the five residents). The average difference between post seminar and pre-seminar comfort levels and knowledge, ideally improvements, will also be reported. Relevance of neuroscience will also be reported on a 1-5 scale score and differences from post to pre-tests will be reported. Results and Discussion: This poster will present the changes in the pre and post surveys for content knowledge and perceived relevance of neuroscience for these five residents. Final data will be available in April. The analysis is to be straightforward t-test.