Residency Training: Challenges and Opportunities in Preparing Trainees for the 21st Century

The future will see increased medicalization of psychiatry and will demand changes in training that better prepare residents for the realities of practice in a sustained period of physician shortage. Residency programs will need to move from the current apprenticeship model of training to competency-based programs built on the CanMEDS 2000 articulation of physician roles. Training will need to focus on evidence-based treatments, more efficient models of health care delivery, more attentive tracking of resident clinical work, and more reliable and standardized methods of evaluating resident competencies.