Improving the Recruitment of Medical Students into Psychiatry

[...]the World Psychiatric Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have both created specific action plans to increase recruitment in the field [2, 5]. [...]according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), there will be a deficit of 22,200 to 32,600 psychiatrists by the year 2025 [13]. [...]emerging data illuminate important information about the timing and stability of choosing psychiatry as a career (unpublished data, 2016 Association for Academic Psychiatry (AAP) annual meeting). [...]psychiatry was noted to have the highest stability of all specialties assessed, with 50% of those interested in psychiatry at matriculation ultimately becoming psychiatrists. The three highest rated influences on specialty choice over the past decade have been fit with personality, interests, and skills, content of specialty, and role model influence (see Fig. 1) [1, 8, 10]; each of these influences can be viewed as falling within climate (i.e., role model influence) and student factors (i.e., student fit with and interest in the content of a particular specialty).