Final-year medical student Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine synchronous summative tele-assessments during a COVID-19 Delta-variant stay-at-home lockdown.

Objective: We describe the planning, process and evaluation of final-year Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine summative assessments in a four-year graduate medical degree program, during a COVID-19 Delta-variant public health stay-at-home lockdown.

Conclusions: We conducted separate written and clinical synchronous (real-time simultaneous) tele-assessments. We used online assessment technology with students, examiners and simulated patients, all in different physical locations.

Conduct and evaluation of final-year medical student summative assessments in Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine during COVID-19: an Australian University Medical School experience.

Objective: To describe and share with the medical education community, the conduct and evaluation of summative graduate medical student assessments in Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine during COVID-19 at an Australian university.

Methods: Summative assessments were redesigned as follows: written assessments were administered via an online platform (WATTLE), while the Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) were conducted via a secure video-conferencing software (Zoom).

Results: Our preliminary analysis of the summative assessments indicated that both examiners and students adapted to the format, with overall performance of the students showing no variation due to timing of the assessment (earlier versus later in the day) and performances similar to face-to-face assessments in previous years.

Reflections on how to approach early career psychiatrist roles and challenges.

Objective: To reflect upon and provide experiential advice to address the roles of early career psychiatrists. The main roles include leading patient care; working in teams; clinical supervision and governance of trainees, and of the psychiatrist by clinical directors/managers. While these roles vary across public and private sectors, the discussion focuses on common elements.

Volunteering in medico-political professional organisations as a socially rewarding and productive activity: a primer for psychiatrists and trainees.

Objective: To describe the rationale for, and benefits of, trainees and psychiatrists to be involved in medico-political volunteering.

Conclusions: Volunteering for professional organisations and other bodies may be considered as an important advocacy role for psychiatrists. Such volunteering is meaningful through shared goals and achievements, as well as developing a sense of mastery and significance as part of a larger quest.

Flattening the curve of COVID-19 for medical education in psychiatry and addiction medicine.

Objective: To describe the context, challenges and responses to COVID-19 public health measures for medical education in psychiatry, with an emphasis on sharing strategies for ongoing COVID-19 challenges.

Conclusion: The rapidity of COVID-19 public health measures instituted in Australia required swift action for medical education to address lockdowns of student clinical placements. The responses included a transition to interim online learning followed by a return to truncated clinical placements renegotiated to conform to public health measures.

Why it's worthwhile training as a psychiatrist.

Objectives: We provide experiential reflections upon the process of training and working as a psychiatrist, with the aim of sparking and maintaining interest in psychiatry as a medical career.

Conclusions: There are many benefits and worthwhile experiences from training and working in psychiatry, especially in the privilege of providing holistic care for persons suffering from mental illness.

Mortality in hospital patients with and without mental disorders: A data-linkage cohort study.

Objective: In the general population, people with mental disorders have increased mortality. This association, however, has not been explored in a population who at some time were inpatients of a public hospital.

Methods: The sampling frame was patients admitted to an Australian regional public hospital 1996-2010.

Open disclosure: ethical, professional and legal obligations, and the way forward for regulation.

Open disclosure (OD) after adverse health care events is the subject of a national standard that has been implemented in state health policy documents, and is included in the Medical Board of Australia's code of conduct for doctors. Nevertheless, doctors have been slow to embrace the practice of OD. There is a strong ethical case for implementing OD in the primary interests of patients, and additionally from a medicolegal risk management point of view.