Welcome to Education in the Department of Psychiatry, UAMS College of Medicine! Our Department is one of the major psychiatric research, education and clinical care centers in the region. Our educational programs, from medical student education to our psychiatry residency and fellowship programs and psychology intern training, are respected both locally and nationally and are an integral part of the Department. With various training sites including University Hospital, the Central Arkansas Veterans Health System, the Arkansas Children's Hospital, the Arkansas State Hospital, the Little Rock Community Mental Health Center and several other associated clinics, our students, interns, residents and fellows experience mental health treatment across all systems and throughout the continuum of care.

Department of Psychiatry faculty are heavily involved in the all aspects of the medical school curriculum. All second-year UAMS medical students take our Behavioral Science course, directed by Dr. Larry Labbate, and students’ NBME scores for the Behavioral Science exam last year were in the 83rd percentile nationally and have been the highest among all the basic science courses for several years now. Junior medical students also rotate through the six-week Psychiatry clerkship, with Dr. Shanna Palmer at the helm. The clerkship has been the highest student-rated major clerkship for over five years. Results for the last three years on the NBME Psychiatry subject examination were well above the national average and highest among the clerkships. Several of our faculty are also small group leaders for the Introduction of Clinical Medicine courses and the Ethics course. A strong foundation in undergraduate medical education from our faculty is certainly part of the reason UAMS medical students go into psychiatry at a rate much higher than the national average. In fact, UAMS is the only medical school in the country to be ranked among the national leaders in recruiting students in psychiatry from 2004-05 to 2006-07 (for more information click here).

Our psychiatric residency program is recognized as one of the strongest in the region. Our residents learn in a supportive environment with faculty that are passionate about teaching. Our faculty include recent winners of the College’s Master Teacher and Educational Innovation awards and also two of the three Chancellor’s Teaching Awards for the College of Medicine in 2007. Puru Thapa, MD, Director of Training at the Arkansas State Hospital, won the College of Medicine’s Golden Apple award in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 and then won a Golden Sash award in 2007. Our residents have also been recognized for their excellence including recent winners of an American College of Psychiatrists’ Laughlin Fellowship, the AADPRT Ginsberg Fellowship, and an Association for Academic Psychiatry Fellowship. The residency offers a research track for those interested and a resident has been accepted as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar in both of the last two years. We offer fellowship programs in child and adolescent psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, addiction psychiatry and geriatric psychiatry.  We also have an NIH-sponsored fellowship in health services research and plan to start one in addiction research next year.

With such a strong presence in the medical school, an excellent general residency program and fellowships, and the new UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute, there has never been a better time to be a trainee in our Department. Please look around the rest of our web site and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

John Spollen, MD
Vice Chair for Education
spollenjohnj@uams.edu
(501)-257-3478