TYOT: Tripadvisor for psychiatry trainees?

Abstract

Background

Although guidelines to ensure the quality of postgraduate psychiatric training in Europe are provided both by the statements of the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees (EFPT) and the UEMS Psychiatry Section's European Training Requirements, actual training conditions in different European countries have been documented to vary widely. Furthermore, most trainees are unaware of the existence of such guidelines.

Objective

The test your own training (TYOT) project set out to create an easy-to-use online tool that allows trainees to assess how their own training compares in relation to the European standards, thereby empowering trainees all over Europe.

Methods

An EFPT Focus Group consisting of psychiatric trainees or early career psychiatrists from eleven European countries created a core survey of key aspects of psychiatry training, such as the duration of the training program, the availability of clinical and educational supervision, access to international professional literature, the use of a national logbook, based on the UEMS European Training Requirements and the EFPT statements. Additional subsets of questions were designed for specific domains such as theoretical training in psychiatry, psychotherapy training and the role of supervisors and training institutions. Next, the questions were transferred to a suitable online hosting platform, which allows to automatically provide feedback in an algorithmic fashion about how the trainee’s experience compares to the European standards.

Results

The TYOT platform will be launched in January 2017 and the first results will be presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry 2017. For more information about the TYOT tool please visit http://efpt.eu/training/tyot/.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.