More support from mental health trusts needed to enable exposure to psychiatry for secondary school pupils.

Abstract

The article by Kennedy & Belgamwar1 nicely illustrates the importance of work experience in psychiatry for secondary school pupils. Unfortunately, this can be difficult to arrange in mental health trusts, despite recent guidance by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.2 Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP) Medical Education Department recently joined forces with Bristol University to provide a week-long summer school event for local sixth-formers. This programme included 2 days of work experience with consultant psychiatrists and their teams as well as half a day with local general practitioners. This followed extensive work by AWP to change their work experience policy to allow 17-year-olds to participate. Our event consisted of taught sessions, similar to the programme detailed by Kennedy & Belgamwar, to help the sixth-formers explore what it might be like to be a medical student and doctor, as well as a session entitled ‘What is mental health?’. Our aim was to additionally support sixth-formers in their application to medical school and so we also provided sessions for personal statement advice and interview practice. We held an evening social event with an opportunity for parents and guardians to attend a question and answer session while the pupils watched and discussed a film related to psychiatry. A summer school competition was held encouraging pupils to write a reflective piece on their experiences of the week, for which they produced some excellent and thoughtful pieces of work. All pupils were allocated a mentor, either a medical student or trainee in psychiatry, to provide support before, during and following the event. Feedback from participants, parents and teachers has been very positive following our event, with pupils particularly valuing work experience, personal statement advice, interview practice sessions and being allocated a mentor. It was fantastic to hear them talking about their positive experiences of psychiatry during mock interview practice sessions. Encouragingly, 67% of our participants said that they would consider a career in psychiatry (‘strongly agree’ or ‘agree’) following the event. Kennedy & Belgamwar’s piece gives some excellent ideas for work experience programmes for secondary school pupils. I hope that more work experience and summer school programmes such as ours can be developed across the country, with the success and positive outcomes shown encouraging mental health trusts to lower their age limits for work experience to enable this.