A Community Engaged Curriculum for Public Service Psychiatry Fellowship Training

Transforming the mental health system into a recovery oriented, integrated system of care requires a psychiatric work force that understands the relationship between recovery processes and community living. Fellowship programs in public and community psychiatry contribute to this transformation by educating psychiatrists about recovery, system dynamics, leadership, effective administration and community involvement. This paper describes a novel approach to fellowship programming that accomplishes these aims through an organizational strategy that emphasizes community engagement. After describing the administrative background for the program, we describe how the content curriculum and teaching process focus on the engagement of community members—both service users and service providers—as participating faculty. The faculty includes over 100 consumers, family members, advocacy group representatives, clinicians, and administrators. We present evaluation data obtained from 45 of the 100 community and university faculty who participated in the first 2 years’ of the fellowship and conclude with a critique and recommendations for further progress in community engaged fellowship training.