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4 Year Two • 12 months honing their experience in psychiatry specialties: child/adolescent, geriatric, addiction, adult inpatient, emergency room, forensic, consultation and electroconvulsive therapy. • four months gaining additional general medicine experience in emergency room, internal, family and hospice inpatient medicine, • two months in neurology and • six months gaining additional general psychiatry experience in adult inpatient and emergency room psychiatry-integrated care. Year One Four years of psychiatry residency training About 1,000 patients are seen annually at the clinic, Brown said. Fourth-year resident Ryan Rode, M.D., said his residency has provided the right mix of clinical experiences and research opportunities, including being able to do research with Sheldon Preskorn, M.D., department professor, who is renowned for his research work on various medications used in mental health treatments. I completed the program with a great knowledge base and knowing how to apply that to my patients," said Rode, who joined a South Carolina hospital after finishing his residency in 2023. Mental health care in other residencies With a shortage of psychiatrists in Kansas and elsewhere, it's important that residents in the front-line programs of family medicine and pediatrics learn how to recognize mental health conditions in their patients. KUSM-Wichita has been at the forefront of recognizing that within its family medicine residency programs, said Kellerman. KUSM-Wichita has three family medicine patient care, along with the 24 psychiatry residents and the department's psychology trainees. Besides seeing inpatients at Ascension Via Christi's behavioral health units, faculty and residents also "see patients who are admitted medically but may have a psychiatric complication that needs to be addressed, and we also see patients in the emergency room as part of our consult/liaison services. Our residents also go to the VA (Robert J. Dole VA Medical Center) and see patients there in its addiction services, outpatient services and their medical inpatients" who need psychiatry care, Brown said. Residents also see patients through COMCARE of Sedgwick County, a licensed community mental health center. The Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences' on-campus clinic not only serves an important role in providing clinical experiences for residents, third-year medical students, psychology interns and postdoc fellows, but it also provides much-needed community care. Filling a need For the past 10 years, Mike Parmley has been the residency program administrator within the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. He has no problem stressing the importance of the four-year psychiatry residency program, which receives as many as 800 applications for its six residency positions each year. "If this program didn't exist, we probably wouldn't have psychiatrists in this area," he said, estimating that about 80% of the currently practicing psychiatrists in Wichita and the surrounding areas did their residency at KUSM-Wichita. Kansas already has a shortage of psychiatrists for its population, with its ratio of 17/10,000 being under the national average of 19.9/10,000, according to a 2022 journal article that Brown, the KUSM-Wichita department chair, co-authored. Parmley said it could be worse if it wasn't for KUSM-Wichita. "There is a huge need," he said. In addition to teaching, faculty within the KUSM-Wichita Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences are providing