My first Academic Abstract

Here is my first attempt at research: it is in the field of Academic Psychiatry. This is an exciting area for us in Medicine. In this particular situation, I have designed and implemented, along with my residency training director here at Harvard, a brand new course that is tailored to raise our psychiatry resident's scores on their annual standardized written psychiatry exam. If succesful, we hope to maintain it as a permanant addition to the Harvard South Shore curriculum.


THE EFFECTIVENESS OF IMPLEMENTING A KNOWLEDGE-BASED REVIEW COURSE FOR IMPROVING THE SCORES ON THE ANNUAL PSYCHIATRY RESIDENT-IN-TRAINING EXAMINATION (PRITE®)

Victor J. Vautrot, MD

Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Program.
VA Boston Healthcare System
940 Belmont Street Brockton, MA 02301

Contact: Victor_Vautrot@hms.harvard.edu

Background: Nearly all psychiatry residents in the United States take the American College of Psychiatrists' PRITE® exam three to four times during their training. It provides feedback to the individual residents about the status of their knowledge as compared to others at the same level of training; and, it is a moderate predictor of performance on the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) Part I examination in psychiatry. To our knowledge, most residents prepare individually for the PRITE by simply reviewing prior exams. Our residency training program is interested in developing a formal course that both enriches residents’ general knowledge in psychiatry and improves their scores on the PRITE simultaneously. This is the first time that we have implemented a course with these objectives in mind. The impact of this intervention, if successful, will be beneficial to each resident, the residency training program, and may serve as a model for other training programs with similar interests. Here, we report on pilot efforts to implement an ongoing program evaluation component as part of this initial course implementation.


Methods: We designed a once-a-week course of nine sessions that leads-up to the fall PRITE. Each session is two hours-long and is equally didactic- and active learning-based. The first hour spotlights one of the 12 subscales of the PRITE with a power point lecture and an interactive residency group discussion. The lecture is presented by a fourth year senior psychiatry resident. The second hour uses a video-projected question and answer test that uses the same format, balance, and subject content of the psychiatry written board exams. Four teams of residents, comprised of balanced, mixed levels of training, actively compete in a game show style manner. Each team convenes and selects their answer choice collectively, an explanation of the correct response appears, and then residency group discussion can follow.

Findings to Date: Eighteen out of twenty-eight residents (64%) completed a survey after the fourth session of the course. 61% (n=11) of the respondents felt that the course was meeting its objectives “all of the time” and 39% “most of the time.” 72% “strongly agree” that the course is presented in an easy-to-follow and understand manner and 28% “agree.” 100% of residents feel that the didactic component is useful. 94% (n=17) feel that the game show component is useful; one responded “neutral.”

Future Steps: We plan to provide one additional, final feedback survey at the end of the course prior to the October PRITE. Resident’s performance on the exam will be provided to the training program the following spring. If the responses from the feedback surveys continue to be positive and the test scores are improved, then the training program will retain the course as a permanent addition to its academic curriculum.