Postgraduate Education

The Division has had another excellent year providing high quality training in child psychiatry for career track child psychiatry residents and for general psychiatry residents completing their core child psychiatry requirements. Eight sites provide core and career track child training. Toronto East General Hospital, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and St. Michael’s Hospital offer child senior selectives only. This year the Division was asked to provide core child psychiatry training for 39 PGY-3 residents. As the psychiatry residency program continues to expand, we have been asked to provide core training for more residents. In order to address the increasing numbers we have added Humber River Regional Hospital for core and career rotations. Toronto East General Hospital provides a senior selective rotation.

This year six residents completed their required career training in child psychiatry. The career child psychiatry training program is the largest child psychiatry program in Canada and one of the largest in North America. We continue to stress the importance of a balanced clinical experience for all core child psychiatry residents with children and youth of all ages and with a variety of diagnoses. Goals and objectives for the core child rotation are reviewed by all residents and supervisors and the core child rotation-specific ITER is used for evaluation. All residents use a clinical log to monitor their clinical experience throughout the rotation. The log is reviewed with their supervisors on a regular basis.

All core and career track seminars occur on Thursdays at the Hospital for Sick Children. The core seminars are well attended and the faculty contribution is highly rated by residents. There are 11 general topic seminars and 10-11 psychotherapy seminars. The psychotherapy seminars cover development and psychotherapy, CBT, family therapy, and psychodynamic psychotherapy. Dr. Priya Watson, the psychotherapy director, has conducted a review of the evaluations of the psychotherapy seminars. The evaluations are uniformly excellent. The Advanced Child Psychopharmacology Course continues to receive strong evaluations. One of the course directors, Dr. Daniel Gorman, is presenting a symposium with international faculty at this year’s joint CACAP/AACAP conference, “International Perspectives on Resident Training in Child Psychopharmacology.”

The divisional chief resident, Dr. Heather Derry, and her career child resident colleagues developed an excellent seminar series for senior child residents. The postgraduate education committee is thankful for Dr. Derry’s hard work and leadership. Dr. Chris Willer was the recipient of the Community Consultation Paper Award. Dr. Nagi Ghabbour was the recipient of the Paul Steinhauer Award for excellence in postgraduate education in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Dr. John Langley, the postgraduate education training director, is a member of the Royal College Specialty Committee for the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Subspecialty. The Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has received full approval from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada to be an accredited training site. The Division will accept the first cohort of three subspecialty residents in July 2012. Finally, we are most grateful for the ongoing support and expertise of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Program Committee and the Subspecialty Curriculum Subcommittee.

Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate education in Child Psychiatry is taught at six sites: The Hospital for Sick Children, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (Child Youth and Family Program), Hincks Dellcrest Centre, The George Hull Centre and Youthdale. Each teaching site has an undergraduate representative that participates in a bimonthly administrative meeting chaired by, Dr. Susan Dundas, the Director of Undergraduate Education, of the Division of Child Psychiatry.

All University of Toronto year 3 clinical clerks participate in a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry course which is embedded in their 3 year adult psychiatry clerkship.  A Centralized curriculum is taught across all six teaching sites. Approximately 36 clerks are taught during each of six clerkship rotations per year, with the largest number allotted to HSC and CAMH.

The Division of Child Psychiatry Undergraduate program has spent the 2010-2011 year integrating and supporting the new curriculum and teaching seminars.  There have been very positive reviews and the committee has begun to work with the central undergrad committee on developing protocols to review teaching for all undergraduate teachers.

After 10 years of excellent leadership of our Undergraduate Training program, Dr. Dundas will be stepping down as of June 30, 2011. She will continue as the site coordinator at Hincks Dellcrest Centre. The new director of Undergraduate Education is Dr. Suneeta Monga.

Fellowship Program

Our Division hosts one of the largest fellowship programs in child and adolescent psychiatry in North America. In 2010, there were 6 Fellows spread among the various sites in the Division. Fellows have diverse educational backgrounds including psychology, psychiatry, nursing, and basic sciences. The program showed a steady increase in the number of international fellows and fellows from other Canadian universities. Over the last year, Fellows presented at various prestigious meetings and achieved several honours. Recent graduates of our Fellowship Programme have gone on to establish careers at York, Ryerson and McMaster Universities.

Continuing Medical Education

The CME program in the Division of Child Psychiatry provides accredited CME events of high effectiveness and innovations. Educational events in the 2010-2011 academic year included the 21st Annual Child Psychiatry Day. The theme of Child Psychiatry Day was, “Autism Spectrum Disorders: Myths and Evidence”, was an outstanding event that drew a capacity crowd and outstanding evaluations.

Given the impending subspecialty status of Child Psychiatry and the anticipated enrollment of resident trainees in this subspecialty, the Faculty Retreat in June 2011 focused on “Designing and Implementing the Child and Adolescent Subspecialty Residency Training Program”. Guest faculty, Susan Glover Takahashi, PhD and Karen Leslie, MD assisted in this task.

After 10 years of outstanding leadership of our CME program, Dr. Tatyana Barankin has stepped down to pursue other interests. We were fortunate that Dr. Tony Pignatiello graciously agreed to organize Child Psychiatry Day, and John Langley assumed the responsibility for our Faculty Retreat.

Appointments :Lecturer:  Parul Agarwal, Seena Grewal, Maged Kodsi, Gabby Ledger, Debbie Leung, Lara Propst, Rajeevan Rasasingham, Pillai Riddell, Azmeh Shahid

Promotions  : Assistant Professor:  Miriam Byrne,  Irfan Mian, Leigh Solomon

Associate Professor:  Bruce Ballon, Alice Charach, Amy Cheung, John Strauss. Full Professor:  Paul Sandor