Psychiatry Residency

 

In addition to hands-on clinical experience, each resident attends weekly seminars that enable the resident to build a solid foundation of knowledge and experience. Each PGY class has one half-day per week for lectures.

Seminars are considered protected time, during which residents are free of clinical or inpatient duties.

Each seminar series has a syllabus with weekly assigned readings. Most readings are provided from our resident library or journal articles, eliminating the costly burden of buying multiple textbooks. 

Other experience is provided through clinical case conferences, grand rounds, ethics meetings, journal clubs and consultation-liaison case conferences.

The tables below represent a summary of the seminars for each year of training. Each row represents a one-hour block of time for the year (or, in PGY1, for the six months spent on psychiatry). Only formal courses are shown in these diagrams. Case conferences and other teaching conferences are scheduled separately and are not shown below.

PGY1 Lectures

PGY2 Lectures

PGY3 Lectures

PGY4 Lectures

Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds

Grand Rounds is hosted by speakers that include guest lecturers, faculty members and fellow residents. The topics presented include clinical issues, research topics and projects, mental health policy issues, psychopharmacology and psychotherapy.

Ethics Conference

The ethics conference is held once per month and includes all psychiatric residents and a faculty member. A wide variety of ethical issues and dilemmas psychiatrists encounter in practice are discussed in this seminar.

Journal Club

Once per month, residents present a summary of one to three articles from a recent psychiatric publication. All residents will read the article(s) prior to discussing them as a group with a faculty mentor, with an emphasis on evaluating the article’s background, methodology, interpretation and significance of findings.

Advanced Psychopharmacology Seminar

Our PGY3 and PGY4 residents meet with a faculty member once each week to review various advanced pharmacology topics. Each week, a psychopharmacology article is reviewed with an emphasis on reviewing evidence-based guidelines and practices.

Outpatient Case Conference

Once per month, PGY3 and PGY4 residents present a patient to fellow residents, a therapist and a psychiatrist. At the presentation, the patient’s history is presented before a faculty member interviews the patient. After the interview, the residents, therapist and attending physician discuss the case with special emphasis on therapy methods and techniques, psychodynamic themes, intra-psychic conflicts and ego defense mechanisms. These conferences have traditionally been a resident favorite.

Consultation-Liaison Case Conference

Each month, the residents and faculty meet to discuss a case from the consultation and liaison service. At each conference, the resident assigned to the consultation-liaison service presents an unusual or interesting case. The topics covered include unusual presentations of psychiatric conditions, end-of-life issues, organic brain syndromes, somatoform disorders and pain management.

Board Review

Residents meet weekly for faculty-led board review. The class emphasizes material that is not only important for the written boards and the in-training exam (PRITE), but also reviews clinical information involving patient care.

Practice Improvement Meeting

This is a quarterly conference that is attended by all faculty and residents within the department to discuss a difficult case or outcome from a risk management perspective.

Call responsibilities start during the first six months of the first year in which new residents have four "buddy" calls. During buddy calls, PGY1 residents are paired with a designated PGY2 or PGY3 resident. The trainers are responsible for educating interns on the various aspects of being on-call. This training provides a unique opportunity to work one-on-one with upper-level residents and exposes PGY1 residents to different ideas and styles while getting to know upper-level residents better. Interns are not cleared to start taking overnight calls until the resident and program director are confident that the resident possesses the skills necessary to succeed.

Call Break Down

Weekend call shifts and night float weeks make up call obligations.

While on-call, residents benefit from the support of attending psychiatry staff. Residents are never expected to make decisions about patient care without faculty support and supervision.

Weekend Call

The weekend call shifts are divided between the available residents in the pool. Forty-eight hours are covered on the weekend, which is split up into four shifts. The weekend call shifts are split evenly between all pool residents, including PGY1 (starting in January), PGY2, and PGY3 (up until December). Some residents elect to "stack" their call responsibilities to form a 24-hour shift and therefore have fewer weekends on call.

Day call will consist of rounding on our inpatient unit at Canyon Creek Behavioral Health.

Night call will cover consults from the Baylor Scott and White Emergency Department from home via telepsychiatry. They will also cover floor calls from our unit at Canyon Creek Behavioral Health.

Night Float (Weeknight Call)

A night float resident covers night call shifts to avoid 24-hour call shifts during the weekdays. The PGY1 residents only take night float weeks in January-June and PGY2 residents in July-December.

Night call will cover consults from the Baylor Scott and White Emergency Department from home via telepsychiatry. They will also cover floor calls from our unit at Canyon Creek Behavioral Health.

Moonlighting is a way residents at BSW can supplement experience and income. Beginning in PGY3, residents in good standing may moonlight. Moonlighting requires written pre-approval from the program director.

Opportunities to moonlight in Psychiatry are readily available throughout Central Texas. One of the opportunities residents most frequently take advantage of is the outpatient clinic moonlighting at the BSW Mental Health Clinic. This moonlighting occurs before or after regular clinic hours, and additional malpractice insurance is not required (your BSW malpractice insurance is acceptable). Most current residents who choose to moonlight do so at Cedar Crest Hospital, telepsychiatry for East Texas Behavioral Health Network, Ascension Providence DePaul Center, and Austin State Hospital. Residents have also been able to sign individual contracts for other moonlighting opportunities, including telepsychiatry consulting for county jails and telepsychiatry inpatient work on a geriatric unit.

Psychiatry research at Baylor Scott & White Health is set up to provide residents with as much research experience as desired. Residents can choose to participate in existing projects or enlist a creative project team to help start a research project of their own. The program provides medical writing editors, assistance in submitting Texas A&M grant applications to the institutional review board and training in ethical research practices to help residents succeed in their research endeavors.

Baylor Scott & White has both clinical and basic sciences research on the main campus in Temple and at the VA campuses in Temple and Waco. The Graduate Medical Education office provides up to $1,500 per poster or paper presentation abstract that gets accepted to a scientific meeting to cover expenses such as airfare, registration, hotel expenses and meals.