Ten Yale Department of Psychiatry residents, fellows, and faculty participated in a clerkship precede September 12 at the Yale School of Medicine.
The precede involved training students in interview techniques with patients that take into consideration implicit biases that may enter into the patient interview process.
The residents, fellows, and faculty facilitated small-group sessions in which clerkship students interviewed standardized patients portraying characteristics and conditions that might elicit explicit and implicit biases on the part of interviewers.
Sixteen people participated in the exercise, and 10 were from the psychiatry department. Psychiatry residents who facilitated sessions were Kristin Budde, MD; Jessica Isom, MD; Chad Lane, MD; Myra Mathis, MD; and Jordan Sloshower, MD.
Psychiatry fellows who participated were Kathleen Broad, MD (Addiction); Andi Diaz Stransky, MD, (Child Study); and Jennifer Dwyer, MD, PhD (Child Study).
Faculty participants were Swapnil Gupta, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry; and Tim VanDeusen, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry and in the Child Study Center.
Psychiatry Chief Resident Kali Cyrus, MD, underwrote the use of standardized patients from her SAMSHA grant for minority trainees. She also wrote one of the two cases used in the interviews and edited the second case; helped recruit and train the facilitators; edited the facilitator guide; and contributed a new piece to the curriculum on using the concepts of transference and countertransference as tools for understanding implicit biases.
The activity was first incorporated in the clerkships last year by Kirsten Wilkins, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and director of clerkships.