Scholarship, Teaching, and Research

The Residency Program offers a wealth of opportunities for scholarship, teaching, and research by residents. Our basic goals are for all residents to learn to read the psychiatric literature critically, to use evidence from research studies to enhance their clinical practice, and to transmit knowledge and skills to others through effective clinical and didactic teaching. To accomplish these goals, we provide the required scholarly and teaching experiences listed below. In addition, we offer a rich array of optional research experiences and teaching electives for interested residents (please see Elective Experiences, below, and information elsewhere on this website about our Research Track).

Required Scholarly and Teaching Experiences

Didactics
Entering residents have a didactic session on Teaching Medical Students. A didactic session at the beginning of the PGY-4 year focuses on teaching skills for didactic sessions (seminars and lectures). These didactic sessions are taught by faculty from the University of Washington's outstanding Medical Education department. The PGY-3 didactics include a 7-session course on Evidence-Based Psychiatry, covering principles of evidence-based medicine and critical reading of the treatment literature, including randomized clinical trials of medication treatments, psychotherapies, and combined treatments, as well as effectiveness/health services studies. Two additional sessions are devoted to basic statistics. The PGY-4 didactics include a required journal club.

Scholarly Projects
During the VA inpatient psychiatry rotation in the PGY-1 or PGY-2 year, each resident completes a review of the literature of a clinically-relevant topic in psychiatry and gives an oral presentation on this topic to other residents, faculty, students, and nursing and other staff. These presentations provide experience in reviewing the literature in a scholarly way, as well as experience in giving teaching presentations. During the UWMC inpatient and consultation-liaison psychiatry rotations in the PGY-1 and PGY-2 years, residents participate in an ongoing evidence-based psychiatry seminar. PGY-4 residents, as a group, do a scholarly project and present a PGY-4 Grand Rounds as part of their Integration seminar. This 30-hour seminar focuses on bringing together and integrating disparate conceptual models and treatment approaches in psychiatry in examining clinical cases or a topic (e.g. recent topics have included antisocial personality, schizophrenia, and sexuality). The seminar combines problem-based learning, an integrative approach, and a group learning process.

Teaching
In addition to the teaching involved in the scholarly projects described above, each resident teaches medical students on inpatient and consultation-liaison psychiatry clinical services. Each PGY-4 resident teaches the PGY-1 class twice a year for a PGY-4 didactic session. For these sessions, PGY-4s can choose any topic related to psychiatry that is of interest to her/him (e.g. Surviving Being On Call, Naturopathic Treatments in Psychiatry, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Meditation, Psychiatrists in the Movies, Forensic Psychiatry). This series of PGY-4 teaching sessions provides experience for the PGY-4s in small-group didactic teaching, and also facilitates connections between the PGY-4 and PGY-1 residency classes.

Summary of Required Scholarly and Teaching Experiences

PGY-1
Teaching Medical Students didactic
Clinical teaching of medical students on inpatient rotations
Review of literature and presentation on VA inpatient psychiatry or UWMC evidence-based psychiatry seminar

PGY-2
Clinical teaching of medical students on inpatient and consultation-liaison psychiatry services
Review of literature and presentation on VA inpatient psychiatry and/or UWMC evidence-based psychiatry seminar

PGY-3
Evidence-Based Psychiatry and Reading the Treatment Literature didactic (7 sessions)
Research Critique (statistics) didactic (2 sessions)

PGY-4
Didactic Teaching session
Teaching PGY-1s (twice)
Journal Club (monthly)
Integration Seminar (30 hours)

Elective Experiences

Teaching
Residents may arrange individualized mentored teaching experiences during their elective time. These may include direct teaching, curriculum development, and/or coursework in medical education. Past teaching projects have included, for example, teaching of a Psychiatry and Art series to residents and medical students, teaching The History of Psychiatry, developing an Interpersonal Therapy course, developing a written Psychodynamic Psychotherapy syllabus in collaboration with the psychoanalyst teaching the basic Psychodynamic Theory course, putting together a Community Psychiatry syllabus. Chief Residents teach medical students and junior residents. Senior residents may also elect to co-teach required psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive-behavior therapy seminars.

Research
Faculty within our department, other medical school departments, and throughout the University of Washington, welcome resident participation in ongoing research projects and also are pleased to mentor residents wishing to develop and pursue their own independent basic or clinical research. Some residents choose to participate in an ongoing research project on a limited basis to see how research is done or to explore the possibility of doing further research in the future. Others are committed to an academic career. For this latter group, we are pleased to design a flexible, individualized curriculum to allow maximal research time while still fulfilling basic clinical residency and Board requirements. We offer a wide variety of basic, clinical, and health services research experiences, and an Interdisciplinary Clinical Research Skills Training Program to facilitate the transition from residency to an academic clinical research career. For further opportunities regarding basic or clinical research opportunities in our department and at the University of Washington, please see the on-line departmental Research Report, the website of the University's Neurobiology and Behavior Program (http://depts.washington.edu/behneuro/), and information about our Neuroscience Track and Research Track on this website.