Child Psychiatry

I first wrote the following suggestion regarding the shortage in child psychiatrists about 40 years ago. I wrote then, and still believe, that the numbers of child psychiatry residents could be increased if the requirement was that a physician interested in child psychiatry needed to take a year of general psychiatry after internship and then follow that with two years of child psychiatry training. By doing this, we would reduce the total time in training by two years, and I think that would influence many more to enter the field. I used the requirements for becoming a pediatrician as a model. In that specialty the individual is required to take only two years of pediatric training after one year of internship.