Stigma in Psychiatry: Impact of a Virtual and Traditional Psychiatry Clerkship on Medical Student Attitudes

Abstract

Objective The objective of the study was to assess the change in medical students’ attitudes towards psychiatry following a virtual clerkship experience compared to a traditional clerkship experience. Method Ninety-seven medical students from the University of Ottawa were assessed pre- and post-clerkship on the ATP-30 (Attitudes Towards Psychiatry-30) measure. Cohorts of students were categorized as pre-COVID or during-COVID depending on when and how they experienced their clerkship (traditional or virtual). The total student response rate was approximately 48%. A quasi-experimental design was implemented, and non-parametric statistics were used to analyze the data. Results Medical students’ overall attitudes towards psychiatry improved from pre- to post-clerkship, with the type of clerkship experience (traditional or virtual) having no significant impact on the magnitude to which attitudes improved. Conclusion Implementation of a virtual clerkship in psychiatry did not deteriorate medical student attitudes towards psychiatry as a specialty, with both the traditional and virtual clerkship program enhancing students’ attitudes towards psychiatry favorably.

A week long “pep” talk – initial and 2–3-year longitudinal data on the Ottawa Psychiatry Enrichment Program (OPEP)

“…These students provided informed consent. This latter sample was part of a separate project that has since been published [ 20 ] and was incorporated into this analysis to serve as a comparison to the OPEP students. The University of Ottawa Office of Research and Integrity provided ethics approval and approved all experimental methods for use of these data.…”

The Importance of Exploring Attitudes Toward Psychiatry, Past, and Present

“…Four articles in the December 2021 issue of Academic Psychiatry [3,4,7,8] add to the existing literature on medical student attitudes toward psychiatry worldwide. "Revisiting the ATP 30: The Factor Structure of a Scale Measuring Medical Students' Attitudes Towards Psychiatry" [4] reexamines the ATP-30 [5], which was originally found to have no meaningful subscales.…”

“…Finally, in "Stigma in Psychiatry: Impact of a Virtual and Traditional Psychiatry Clerkship in Medical Student Attitudes" [8], the ATP-30 is utilized to examine changes in attitudes toward psychiatry in a virtual versus in-person clerkship experience. Although the authors admit that existing literature has not revealed a consensus on the "influential nature clerkships have on students and their attitudes toward psychiatry as a specialty," they hypothesized that the virtual model would have a detrimental impact on attitudes.…”