About the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Program

Overview

Program Overview

The two-year Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency is fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. We accept trainees who have completed, in addition to an internship, a minimum of two years of accredited training in General Psychiatry.

Residents typically spend two years full-time in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Training Program. It is a complete and fully integrated program administered and taught by a large and diverse faculty. While most of the training experiences are in Chapel Hill, the facilities of Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, NC, are fully integrated into the program as are a number of community psychiatry sites throughout the state. Our goal is to effectively integrate the biological, psychological and social aspects of child and adolescent psychiatric theory and practice. We are committed to insuring that trainees are fully grounded in the theory and practice of child and adolescent psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, group therapy, family therapy, crisis and emergency child and adolescent psychiatry, and consult-liaison child and adolescent psychiatry. Acquiring a sound knowledge of human development is stressed and considerable emphasis is placed on psychodynamic principles. We anticipate that every resident who completes our program will have competence in development, assessment, prevention of psychopathology, and utilization of a full array of current child and adolescent psychiatric interventions from infancy through adulthood. Also, for those who wish, we offer additional training in neuropsychiatry and research. In addition, child and adult psychoanalytical training is available through the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Carolinas.

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First Year

The first year emphasizes closely supervised training in the multifaceted diagnostic process in child and adolescent psychiatry and in various treatment techniques of the child and the family. This experience is designed to teach the resident the skills needed to thoroughly evaluate the child, his/her family, and his/her environment leading to an in-depth social, biological, psychological, and psychodynamic understanding of the child. With this preparation in the first year a variety of consultative, elective and research experiences can be meaningfully undertaken later in the residency.

During the first year, each resident spends approximately nine months half-time working on child and adolescent inpatient units. In addition, each resident spends three months part-time in child and adolescent neurology clinics.

During both years of the residency, residents work with both children and parents in various outpatient settings gaining experience in diagnosis and in a wide variety of therapeutic modalities. All residents carry several long-term psychotherapy cases and have at least three hours weekly of individual supervision of their outpatient work.

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Second Year

In addition to continuing with outpatient work begun in the first year, during the second year of training residents rotate through a number of services, including medical consult-liaison, pre-school/school consult-liaison, the child maltreatment team, Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication-handicapped Children program (TEACCH), and the developmental neuropsychiatry clinic. Residents have further opportunities for elective experiences in a vast number of areas, such as research, autism, mental retardation, eating disorders, neuropsychiatry, various liaison experiences, school consultation, intensive long-term adolescent hospitalization, and community mental health to name a few.

Throughout the two years of training, the resident will demonstrate increasing proficiency in the following six areas of core competency: Clinical science, interpersonal skills and communication, patient care, practice-based learning and improvement, professionalism and ethical behavior, and system-based care.

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Night Call

Night call is kept at a minimum which helps residents maintain the energy level necessary to master the knowledge and skills they will need upon leaving the program. At present, first year child residents rotate in providing back-up emergency call from home. This call is relatively light with residents only occasionally receiving calls from their in-house General Psychiatry resident colleagues. In the second year there is no night call. Approximately every tenth weekend, the resident will round on Saturday and Sunday morning with the inpatient Child or Adolescent Psychiatry Attending.

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Seminars

Residents are expected to attend and participate in numerous didactic experiences throughout both years. These include a weekly two-hour multidisciplinary diagnostic conference, a weekly one-hour continuing case conference, a weekly one-hour selected topics and readings seminar and a weekly one-and-a-half hour CORE child seminar series focusing on normal development, pathology, and treatment. In addition, there are various didactic experiences on individual rotations.

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Teaching

In addition to being students, we also expect residents to be teachers. In the second year of the residency all residents are expected to function for a period of time as the chief resident and provide leadership in the area of administration and teaching. They are expected to be actively involved in teaching their fellow general psychiatry residents and medical students. They are afforded an opportunity to help supervise junior residents who are providing psychotherapy to children.

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Applying

For instructions on how to apply, please see the Letter to Applicants from the Administrator.

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Contact

If you have questions that are not answered on these pages, please do not hesitate to contact Lesia Irving, Training Administrator for the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Program, via email at lesia_irving@med.unc.edu or by phone at (919) 966-4764.

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