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

Psychiatry residency training programs in Canada have aprincipal responsibility to train young physicians to meet the psychiatric health care needs of the population through high-quality patient care and innovative research. This man-date requires that training programs be aware of and respond to the community’s changing clinical and academic needs. We can reasonably assume continued rapid expansion in our understanding of the biology of mental illness, an increase in effective psychotherapeutic interventions, a strong demand for more educational and clinical accountability, and applica-tion of innovative technology to teaching—all in the context of a worsening physician shortage. Each of these factors re-quires significant revisions to our current approaches to training. Training programs face the dilemma of attempting to provide new knowledge, skills, and models for practice while tied t