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Psychiatry Clerkship (PSC)

4 weeks

Clerkship Director
Ryan Peterson, MD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychiatry
petersonrt@upmc.edu

Course Description

The Psychiatry Clerkship is a four-week experience centered on inpatient and partial hospital behavioral health care. Students take responsibility for the care of individual patients, under supervision, learning both assessment and management skills for common and important behavioral health conditions.

Students participate in classroom-based didactics, reflective writing, and group therapy. Students also participate in formative standardized patient encounters.

Course Objectives​

  1. Demonstrate basic understanding of the 10 most common psychiatric disorders through observation and interaction with patients suffering from these disorders
  2. Screen for specific psychiatric symptoms from the most prevalent psychiatric disorders 
  3. Recommend work-up and treatment for such symptoms.
  4. Identify, organize, and accurately communicate mental status exam findings in oral presentation
  5. Identify, organize, and accurately communicate mental status exam findings in written documentation
  6. Adequately assess and manage patients for key, psychiatry-specific issues such as decision-making capacity, lethality, non-adherence, and substance withdrawal
  7. Demonstrate knowledge to prescribe the most commonly and broadly used pharmacotherapies
  8. Conduct specific, important, brief, commonly used and efficacious psychotherapies.
  9. Demonstrate sound clinical reasoning
  10. Demonstrate professional behaviors
  11. Demonstrate self-Improvement by asking for receiving and responding to feedback
  12. Demonstrate commitment to life-long learning by independently assessing evidence and applying to patient care
  13. Establish and maintain appropriate therapeutic relationships with patients. 
  14. Work effectively with others as a member or leader of a health care team or other professional group

Educational Methods

  • Inpatient patient-care activities
  • Self-paced readings and modules
  • Reflective writing
  • Standardized patient workshop
  • Case-based didactics

Assessment

  • Clinical Assessment: 50%
  • NBME Subject Exam: 25%
  • Quizzes: 5%
  • MMSE: 15%
  • Professionalism: 5%

The clerkship is graded Honors, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, and Unsatisfactory.