Three Yale Department of Psychiatry trainees have been accepted to the 2018 Harvard Macy Institute’s Program for Post Graduate Trainees: Future Academic Clinician-Educators to be held Dec. 8-10 in Boston.
Jessica Isom, MD, MPH, a fourth-year resident, and third-year residents Lily Balasuriya, MD, MMS, and Joe Gallego, MD, will participate in the three-day program, which works with post-graduate trainees who seek to develop skills in teaching and medical education curriculum development.
Scholars must apply with a medical education project that will benefit a current or future training program where they work or teach. The focus of Balasuriya’s project will be to expand the Human Experience Track of the residency program’s Social Justice and Health Equity Curriculum (SJHEC) to include new and creative sessions for third- and fourth-year trainees.
Gallego’s project will be to develop a public psychiatry curriculum for the PGY-2 4th floor inpatient rotation at the Connecticut Mental Health Center.
“By formalizing didactic and independent-learning components of the rotation, the curriculum aims to engage rotating residents around their passion for public psychiatry and promote their exploration of the field,” Gallego wrote. “Didactic and independent-learning components of the curriculum will focus on the development of clinical skills needed to evaluate and treat patients with serious mental illness (SMI). Discussions with CMHC leaders and site visits of key community services will facilitate a deeper understanding of the systems within which patients with SMI receive care.
Isom has proposed an educational project that produces a focused curriculum review plan for the SJHEC. "The curriculum currently lacks a strong fidelity to outcomes based teaching and learning, assessment and evaluation. This presents a problem as we endeavor to ensure we are reaching our objective of influencing behaviors in psychiatric practice during and post-residency," she wrote.
As co-facilitator for the SJHEC in 2018-19, Isom wrote that she wants to help guide the curriculum tract leaders toward a "clearly defined and thoughtful incorporation of specific teaching and learning methods for each curricular track. This will include suggested revisions of the current curricular objectives to mirror outcomes based knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors. Once this goal is reached in partnership with the PGME program, I would then like to formulate an assessment and evaluation plan for the curriculum that spans all four post-graduate years."