Reforming Undergraduate Psychiatry Training in Ukraine

Abstract

In Ukraine, mental health problems are common yet the mental health services available are still old fashioned and based on healthcare approaches used in the Soviet Union, providing mainly inpatient services and rudimentary community services. The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) to reduce the mental health treatment gap all over the world and 2 years later introduced the WHO mhGAP-Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG), version 2.0 (2016) as not only an educational tool, but also an evidence based guideline to scale up services for mental, neurological and substance use (MNS) conditions with an objective to reduce gap between available health systems capacity and resources for mental health. The main aim of this paper is to describe reforms of undergraduate psychiatry training in Ukraine using Kyiv Medical University as a case example. Kyiv Medical University (KMU) is the first university in Ukraine to introduce the mhGAP-IG in Ukraine. The revised psychiatry curricula in KMU aims to strengthens the evidence based teaching practices, to put emphasis on community orientated mental health care, and to use interactive teaching methods that the university hopes will attract more future doctors to psychiatry and ideally contribute towards the reduction of the mental health treatment-gap in Ukraine.