A Survey of Undergraduate Teaching of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the United Kingdom

Child and adolescent psychiatry is a relatively new subspeciality and it is only recently that its practitioners have started to examine the problems of teaching it on the under graduate curriculum. Questions about when it is best taught during the undergraduate years and what constitutes a core curriculum are still contentious. Indeed some psychiatrists have yet to be convinced that it should be taught at all at an undergraduate level. If child psychiatry is to recruit from the ranks of the best medical students, and if future general practitioners are to be prepared realistically for their likely workloads, then it seems logical that child and adolescent psychiatry should have a significant place in the undergraduate curriculum. This article presents the results of a survey of all the UK medical schools carried out to assess the current status of undergraduate child and adolescent psychiatry teaching.