The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada sets the training objectives and standards for all Canadian Postgraduate Training Programs and the Department of Psychiatry at UBC is accredited by the Royal College with external review in 2016 until the next accreditation visit in 2019.
Currently there are 114 residents in the five-year program with 22 PGY1 residents being enrolled each year. The academic year runs from July 1 to June 30. Training to be a general psychiatrist takes five years. In 2012 a further year of training in the subspecialties of Child, Geriatric, and Forensic Psychiatry was made available.
Clinical training takes place on hospital in-patient wards, at out-patient units, at community mental health centres and subspecialty clinics. Mandatory rotations include: general hospital in-patient/OPD, child, chronic care, addiction, consultation-liaison, geriatric, and community psychiatry. There is provision for 12 months of elective time.
For those residents with expertise and interest in research, a specially tailored training track has been developed that maximizes research time within the Royal College's training guidelines. Many research opportunities exist for all trainees outside of this track with projects being developed by the third year of training and completed during elective time in the last year of training. One day per week is dedicated to academic seminars.
The philosophy of our program is to train psychiatrists in the broad aspects of the bio-psycho-social model of medicine and psychiatry and to prepare those who are interested for further subspecialty training or Fellowships.