Psychiatric education: a survey of Greek trainee psychiatrists.

Objective: This survey investigates psychiatric trainees' attitudes regarding specific educational fields, in order to detect possible divergence from the priorities specified by the European Board of Psychiatry (EBP). It also explores certain factors which influence these attitudes.

Method: A structured questionnaire containing 80 randomized educational objectives, which corresponded to 18 basic areas of psychiatric knowledge and competence, was given to 60 psychiatric trainees in 12 psychiatric training institutions in Greece. For the analysis of data, we used descriptive statistics, correlations, and one-way analysis of variance.

Results: Despite the variance which existed, the majority of trainees considered nearly all the fields in question as essential for their training, with great priority given to psychopharmacology and biological psychiatry by 91.7% and 91.4% of the trainees, respectively. On the other hand, we found that stage of training, gender, training centre and medical school of graduation played an important role in the formation of the trainees' priorities.

Conclusions: The investigation of trainees' attitudes towards educational fields in psychiatry can be very useful in the development of a training plan, and at the same time constitute a valuable index for monitoring the responsiveness of training programmes to the European guidelines for psychiatric training.