The Clerk Crisis Clinic: a novel educational program.

Objective: Although there is a literature discussing and describing medical students providing psychotherapy, there has been little written about students doing crisis therapy with an emergency department patient population. At the University of Toronto, third-year clinical clerks can do a rotation in the Clerk Crisis Clinic where they are assigned patients who are preselected from the emergency department population. The author describes the program and presents results from questionnaires given to patients and students between 1997 and 2000.

Methods: Students met individually with their patients for six sessions, with supervision provided twice a week in a group setting by a senior resident or staff psychiatrist. A modified Consumer Satisfaction Questionnaire was used to survey the patients at the end of their treatment. The medical students completed a therapist evaluation of services form, created for this clinic, at the end of the rotation.

Results: Feedback from both patients and students has been positive. Patients have been satisfied with the therapy and have not expressed any difficulty working with students as therapists. Students have found the experience useful and relevant to their training.

Conclusions: Medical students are capable of providing crisis therapy to selected patient populations.