Recruitment

Positive and negative developments in child and adolescent psychiatry have provided challenges and opportunities throughout a 100-year history of its profession, from the initial child guidance clinic movement to the current expanding scientific knowledge base. The expansion of a high-quality workforce in clinical, academic, and research arenas remains to be a major goal of the field. Many complex, intertwined factors at institutional and individual levels have affected recruitment of medical students into child and adolescent psychiatry. Lack of exposure in the medical school curriculum, increasing levels of educational debt burden, long years of residency training, and relatively low income potential have been barriers of recruitment [20]. Academic child and adolescent programs have struggled in the era of managed care on top of federal and state funding cuts for support of recruiting residents and faculty. In the face of the stigma of mental illness, devalued image of the profession, and overwhelming negative environment, child and adolescent psychiatry has been able to attract small numbers of dedicated and humanistically orientated young trainees into the field and has made impressive progress in its short history. Growing scientific knowledge through basic science and clinical research-especially in neuroscience, developmental science, and clinical care (eg, neuroimaging, genetics, pediatric psychopharmacology)-has been enriching the profession's traditional biopsychosocial model of clinical care. The clinical demands for and a chronic undersupply of qualified child and adolescent psychiatrists have raised the public awareness as evidenced by markedly increasing media coverage in recent years, both print and broadcast. A report on the workforce shortage by the Associated Press in April 2006 resulted in wide coverage of the issue in more than 120 news outlets in the United States and throughout the world. The public awareness of and demand for access to appropriate child and adolescent psychiatric services have led policymakers and accreditation and health care organizations to consider support for research training, flexible portals into child and adolescent psychiatry training, and opening of new training programs. The supply-demand dynamics also have resulted in a favorable job market for child and adolescent psychiatric practitioners-especially graduating residents-in terms of flexibility in the location and kind of professional career and an increasing income potential [31]. The AACAP's 10-year recruitment initiative strives to inform and generate the support of medical/psychiatric educators, governmental agencies, and the public at large to improve the profession's recruitment efforts to provide access to quality care and needed services to the nation's children and adolescents and their families.