The making of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Australia and New Zealand.

Child and adolescent psychiatry has an opportunity to adapt alongside the advancements in medical knowledge, post-graduate training, epidemiological realities and clinical service models. Here, we are guided by the mental health needs of our community's young and their families in our review of child and adolescent psychiatry training in Australia and New Zealand. We recognise that training must respond to clinical demand and service reform while ensuring a range of clinical and educational experiences to deliver expectable competencies in order to produce child and adolescent psychiatrists that meet the communities' needs now and in the future. We argue that training programmes be subject to rigorous evaluation by embedding continuing cycles of improvement including regular review and international bench marking.

Using entrustable professional activities to guide curriculum development in psychiatry training.

BACKGROUND: Clinical activities that trainees can be trusted to perform with minimal or no supervision have been labelled as Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs). We sought to examine what activities could be entrusted to psychiatry trainees in their first year of specialist training. METHODS: We conducted an online survey of Fellows of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP). RESULTS: The majority of respondents considered initiating patients with the common medications, discharging patient suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or following a crisis admission, conducting risk assessments and managing psychiatric emergencies were activities that trainees could be entrusted with by the end of the first stage of training. CONCLUSIONS: Four activities were identified that trainees should be entrusted with by the end of their first year of training. Each of these activities comprises a set of competencies in each of the CanMEDS roles. When a trainee is unable to satisfactorily perform an EPA, deficits in the underpinning competencies can be a focus for remediation. Further EPAs are being identified in areas of more specialised practice for use within more advanced training.