Integrating Community Psychiatry Into Residency Training

Beginning in 1969 a training program in community psychiatry was developed in a psychiatric hospital that had become a community mental health center with responsibility for a catchment area. Initially the program focused on individual supervision of psychiatric residents in their work with inpatients from the catchment area. The inadequacies of that approach led to assigning residents to spend four hours each week in a comprehensive neighborhood health center. Later they were also assigned to interdisciplinary inpatient teams led by community psychiatry supervisors. The authors describe the evolution of the program, report the results of an evaluation, and present some conclusions about training in community psychiatry.