Resident Training in the Psychiatric Emergency Service: Duty Hours Tell Only Part of the Story

Abstract

Psychiatry residents in North America are generally required to work on-call on the psychiatric emergency service (PES) during training. Resident discontent with the long hours, onerous case loads, and lack of on-call teaching has been reported as a barrier to PES training. Given that the PES is a longitudinal and important experience, we sought to develop a better understanding of this service from the resident perspective and identify factors that affect residents as they work and train in this area.