Improving Medical Student Placements in Psychiatry: Review of Literature And A Practical Example

The support of medical students during their placement in busy clinical settings is an important topic. Clinicians and other health professionals have a duty to provide teaching to medical students and supporting them to achieve their learning objectives. This paper reviews the literature on workplace learning and discusses the importance of providing a fruitful and welcoming clinical placement to medical students in Old Age Psychiatry. It then describes a local scheme to improve medical students placement and how the changes introduced in this scheme helped to enhance learning and satisfaction of the medical students. Although the paper discusses the students placement in Old Age Psychiatry, it is relevant to all other medical and surgical specialities where busy clinicians face many challenges in providing teaching to medical students. The scheme described in this paper to improve students placement used existing resources and encouraged the input from professionals working within the team (e.g., psychologists, nurses and support workers) to enrich the students placement. Using this multidisciplinary model of teaching and supervision helped to overcome many challenges in providing a positive and useful clinical placement to the medical students. Keywords: Clinical, Education environment, Best evidence medical education. Medical students. Psychiatry.