UCSF is home to national leaders in medical education and education research, and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences is no exception. UCSF takes pride in supporting and fostering its clinician-educators, upholding the dual values of health care professionals and educators. To that end, several core faculty members of the department and the residency program are also members of the Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators and graduates of the Teaching Scholars Program.
The mission statement of the UCSF Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program includes:
- Fostering the development of psychiatrists who practice critical thinking and an evidence-based approach in all aspects of their work
- Maintaining scientific excellence and clinical relevance in the didactic program and the clinical training experiences of residents
The program seeks to provide broad exposure to a diversity of patients, modalities, therapies, and environments, while also emphasizing longitudinal relationships through communities of patients and teaching of fellow residents. To train future leaders in psychiatry, the didactic curriculum supports residents in their development of expertise in multiple domains of physicianship and psychiatric practice including in the roles of clinician, consultant, service innovator, team leader, educator, scholar, and specialist.
Didactics in the residency program are organized and taught with adult learning theory in mind, with consideration to cognitive load, psychological safety, clinical relevancy, just-in-time learning, inclusive and equitable learning environments, and resident feedback for continuous improvement.
Centralized didactics
Residents are provided with protected time from clinical responsibilities to attend centralized didactics on Wednesday afternoons, which at occur at least every other week for PGY-1 and PGY-2 residents and every week for PGY-3 and PGY-4 residents at the new UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building near the Mission Bay campus. Several didactic weeks are held concurrently between classes to allow for near-peer teaching, mentorship, and collaboration. There are over 500 hours of scheduled didactic sessions across the four years of our program.
Courses taught in the centralized didactics curriculum include:
PGY-1
- Acute Hospitalization
- Advocacy and Structural Competency
- Substance Use and Addiction
- Psychiatric Diagnosis and Phenomenology
- Psychiatric Interview and Formulation
- Introduction to Psychotherapy and the Therapeutic Relationship
PGY-2
- Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry
- Outpatient Psychiatry
- Integrative Psychotherapy and Formulation
- Neurodevelopment
- Palliative Medicine and Psychiatry
- Neurology, Neuroradiology and Neuropsychiatry
- Interventional Psychiatry
- Psychedelic Psychiatry
- Psychodynamic Thinking
PGY-3
- Residents Case Conference
- Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
- Geriatric Psychiatry
- Forensic Psychiatry
- LGBTQ Mental Health
- Reproductive Psychiatry
- Sleep Medicine
- Collaborative and Integrated Care
- Quality Improvement
- Clinical Psychopharmacology Seminar
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
- Good Psychiatric Management of Borderline Personality Disorder
- Advanced Neuroscience Seminar Year 1– Basic Science Focus
PGY-4
- Leadership Seminar
- History of Psychiatry
- Clinical Neuropsychiatry Workshop
• Advanced Psychopharmacology Seminar
• Advanced Psychotherapy Course
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills for Psychiatrists
• Master Clinician Seminar
• Advanced Neuroscience Seminar Year 2 – Clinical Neuroscience Focus
Site-based didactics
Additional protected time for didactics is provided with a just-in-time learning philosophy via site-based didactics that are taught in parallel and on-site with clinical rotations at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco VA Medical Center, UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital at Mount Zion, and the UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus Heights.
Topics taught in the various site-based didactics curricula include:
- Acute Psychopharmacology
- Evidence-Based Medicine Seminar
- Novel Therapeutics Journal Club
- Couples Therapy
- Group Therapy
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy
- Military and Veterans History, Trauma, and Culture
Grand rounds
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Grand Rounds series seeks to promote excellence and quality in clinical care; introduce clinicians to recent advances in medical care; provide updates on scientific advances that affect the practice of medicine; and provide a forum for discussion of topics that strengthen the relationship of psychiatry to the broader community. Departmental grand rounds are held at 8:30 a.m. on the first and second Tuesdays, as well as at noon on the second Wednesdays, of each month in the Pritzker Building auditorium.
The Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Series (DVLS) is a group of special Grand Rounds talks given by preeminent subject matter experts in mental health and other related fields. These speakers are invited from around the nation and the world to share their experience and insight with UCSF faculty, staff, and trainees.
Residency education grounds
On third Tuesday mornings of month, when there is no department-wide Grand Rounds scheduled, the Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program hosts residency-wide seminars that bring residents from different classes together in part to foster discussion and community building.
Previous education rounds topics have included:
- Applying to fellowships panel
- Academic, private practice, and public careers panels
- Technology and mental health
- Metabolic psychiatry
- Coping with suicide
- Complementary medicine and integrative psychiatry
- Ethics and professional identity
- Financial literacy
- Risk assessment
