A Curriculum for Training Medical Faculty to Teach Mental Health Care—and Their Responses to the Learning

We previously trained general medicine faculty intensively in 3 evidence-based models essential for mental health care.1-4 They, in turn, trained medical residents in the models over all 3 years of residency training.5 The results of this quasi-experimental trial demonstrated highly significant learning by residents on all 3 models.6 To address the mental health care crisis caused by the severe shortage of psychiatrists in the United States,7-14 we propose this train-the-trainer intervention as a model for widescale training of medical faculty in mental health care, thus enabling them to then train their own residents and students indefinitely.6 This brief report details the faculty training curriculum in mental health care and its teaching, along with the responses of medical faculty to the training; no similar training experiences have been reported in the medical or psychiatric literature. While the residency training curriculum has been published,5 the faculty training curriculum has not. Additionally, faculty responses to the training are important because they can provide key information about what did and did not work. Even though demonstrated to be effective for teaching mental health care to residents,6 the training must also be acceptable to its new teachers.15