A Community Engaged Curriculum for Public Service Psychiatry Fellowship Training

Abstract

Transforming the mental health system into a recovery oriented, integrated system of care requires a psychiatric work force that understands the relationship between recovery processes and community living. Fellowship programs in public and community psychiatry contribute to this transformation by educating psychiatrists about recovery, system dynamics, leadership, effective administration and community involvement. This paper describes a novel approach to fellowship programming that accomplishes these aims through an organizational strategy that emphasizes community engagement. After describing the administrative background for the program, we describe how the content curriculum and teaching process focus on the engagement of community members-both service users and service providers-as participating faculty. The faculty includes over 100 consumers, family members, advocacy group representatives, clinicians, and administrators. We present evaluation data obtained from 45 of the 100 community and university faculty who participated in the first 2 years' of the fellowship and conclude with a critique and recommendations for further progress in community engaged fellowship training.

Recovery-oriented Medical Training: An Informational Rapid Literature Review for the University of Recovery as a New Concept of Co-learning between Patients and (Future) Healthcare Providers

“…Some themes are cross-cutting, for instance that of engaging doctors [52] or patients [53]. Indeed, besides engagement of patients in their own recovery journey, the active participation of patients in research [54] or in medical training is a key feature of a recovery-oriented approach [55].…”

“…Target audience Main focus Training of medical students or residents Agrawal et al [55] residents engagement yes [52] providers/patients engagement yes…”

“…In the same vein, while describing a number of recovery oriented leadership and fellowship programs and post graduate seminars in the states of New York and Pennsylvania, Sowers and Marin [52] postulate that to support the transformation process, psychiatrists must be able to move beyond a role defined primarily by diagnosis and medication management. Therefore, they argue, psychiatrists, like all providers, must acquire the skills and understanding to develop trusting and nurturing relationships with service users and their families.…”

Recovery Mentors as continuing professional development trainers for better recognition of the epistemic value of the experiential knowledge and improved access to recovery-oriented practices

“…Their engagement improves sensitivity and respect, for example through recognizing the importance of having a language that moves away from a problem-saturated view to a shared language about hope and possibility. To support the transformation process, professionals should be able to move beyond a role defined primarily by diagnosis and medication management [33]. To do so, they need to acquire the skills and understanding to develop trusting and nurturing relationships with service users living with psychiatric disorders.…”