Undergraduate education and recruitment into psychiatry

Abstract

From 1969 to 1979 senior medical students from the University of Colorado School of Medicine entered psychiatric residencies at an average rate of 3.8%. The university gradually instituted a series of changes in its undergraduate psychiatric education program for medical students, and the senior class of 1980 was the first to be exposed to all of the changes. In 1980-1982 7.7% of the seniors went into psychiatric residencies. The authors describe the curriculum changes and speculate that more attention to the quality of medical students' psychiatric education at the undergraduate level enhances recruitment into psychiatric residencies.