Sharpest Scalpel Q & A with Dr. Amy Woods, Program Director, CDU Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship( continued)
Within the fellowship program we are dedicated to training child and adolescent psychiatrists who are compassionate, social justice advocates, and excellent clinicians. In our program, fellows are required to engage with the community within the clinical setting but also beyond. As with the legacy of King / Drew, we recognize that to be effective in our work as healers, we must expand our reach beyond the confines of the clinic. We are continuing the legacy in which CDU was founded in trying to heal the wounds of humanity that have been neglected for far too long.
Please discuss your vision of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry program under your leadership. One of the first tasks that was taken on was to create a mission statement for the program. We have used this mission statement as our guidepost in the development of this program. One of our primary goals is to train physicians to lead with their humanity and to develop the clinical acumen to provide excellent clinical care to under-resourced communities. Through advocacy and compassionate care, hope to reduce the impact of mental illness in children, improve the systems that serve them, and promote well-being and resilience in their communities.
We have been able to have such a lofty mission because of the leadership of Dean Prothrow-Stith and Dr. Shervington who believe in our mission and have allowed us the freedom to create a program that allows us to support the well-being of the Fellows to allow them the richest environment for learning and to foster the passion to make the societal changes to promote health justice.
Do you feel that Psychiatry has an important role in CDU’ s outreach to the local community? We are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. Black youth who have a suicide rate that is climbing with children aged 5-12 years old twice as likely to die by suicide than their white counterparts( Sheftall et al., 2023). They need our help, and they need to feel heard. It is going to have to be a collective effort involving many stakeholders to address the complex societal issues that impact the mental health of our youth.
As psychiatrists we are one piece of the solution towards collective healing. In addition to their clinical experiences. The fellowship program has developed a relationship with the CDU Pipeline Programs Saturday Science Academy to provide psychoeducation to our youth but also to be role models for the youth in hopes that they can see themselves in our fellows.
How will your Fellows be deployed as part of their assimilation into their career of client service? Our fellows rotate through 10 different clinical sites. This allows them to develop an understanding of the complexities of our mental health care delivery system within Los Angeles County. We hope that this knowledge will allow them to be able to assist their patients in navigating such a challenging system. We hope that we give them a training experience that inspires them to continue to work in SPA 6 to meet to address our youth mental health crisis.
Do you see an integrated, interdisciplinary approach being effective? If so, what are the strategies that you and your team are implementing? As psychiatrists we understand that our colleagues in primary care are bearing a lot of the burden of treating patients with mental health issues. The Psychiatry Department is working with Family Medicine on a grant funded by Health Resources and Services Administration to enhance the training in behavioral health for primary care physicians. They will be working closely with the associate program director Dr. Nithya Ravindran to train our family medicine doctors to feel competent and confident in meeting the mental health needs of our youth in a primary care setting.
Footnote Sheftall, A. H., By, Sheftall, A. H., & 11, A.( 2023, April 11). The tragedy of black youth suicide. AAMC. https:// www. aamc. org / news / tragedy-blackyouth-suicide #:~: text = From % 202000 % 20to % 20 2020 % 2C % 20Black, suicide % 20than % 20their % 20 White % 20counterparts.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 42