UEMS Psychiatry Interview with Dr Rachael Cullivan-Elliott, Vice President for CME

Consultant Psychiatrist and Vice President for Continuing Medical Education (CME) in Ireland recently spoke with the Union Européenne des Médecins Spécialistes (UEMS) about her beginnings in psychiatry, her experience with CME as a working psychiatrist and the ongoing work of keeping CME up-to-date, innovative and diverse.

Read a quote from Dr Cullivan-Elliott below, and read the interview in full on the UEMS website here.

We are certainly moving away from traditional institutional care and developing more individualised approaches using community–based working with a recovery focus. Harmonisation in training for the benefit of patients is the objective of the Section and the development of a European Board Exam in Psychiatry will assist with this. The Section promotes awareness of the need to respect Human Rights in a specialty with a past history of restrictive treatments. The relevant Working Group in the Section plans to have a CME course on the topic at the next EPA Congress and the ultimate goal is that coercive interventions will be minimised and seen as a last resort rather than part of routine practice.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the big news story at present (although I think psychiatrists will be a challenge to replace) and while remote consultations were a necessity during the pandemic and have become more established, we are still too close to those events to know what the longer term consequences of this will be. It has been clear however that the value of the face to face interaction has not been diminished and we still need to work towards more effective and better tolerated treatments for the major mental illnesses. The use of algorithms and machine learning from large amounts of clinical data will certainly be part of our future.

The biggest challenges to future development are nothing new: Insufficient resources for psychiatric services, societal challenges including stigma, war and poverty, and a lack of sufficiently early interventions that might prevent the development of severe mental illness. I would also have to add from experience in my current practice, that recreational drug use – of cannabis in particular – is resulting in large numbers of young people presenting to overstretched psychiatric services with negative impact on all concerned.