Exploring Current Practices, Needs, and Barriers for Expanding Distributed Medical Education and Scholarship in Psychiatry: Protocol for an Environmental Scan Using a Formal Information Search Approach and Explanatory Design

Abstract

Background Distributed medical education (DME) offers manifold benefits, such as increased training capacity, enhanced clinical learning, and enhanced rural physician recruitment. Engaged faculty are pivotal to DME's success, necessitating efforts from the academic department to promote integration into scholarly and research activities. Environmental scanning has been used to gather, analyze, and apply information for strategic planning purposes. It helps organizations identify current practices, assess needs and barriers, and respond to emerging risks and opportunities. There are process models and conceptual frameworks developed for environmental scanning in the business and educational sectors. However, the literature lacks methodological direction on how to go about designing and implementing this strategy to guide research and practice in DME, especially in the psychiatry field. Objective This paper presents a protocol for an environmental scanning that aims to understand current practices and identify needs and barriers that must be addressed to facilitate the integration of psychiatrists from the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine’s distributed education sites in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the Department of Psychiatry, contributing for the expansion of DME in both provinces and informing strategic planning and decision-making within the organization. Methods This protocol adopts an innovative approach combining a formal information search and an explanatory design that includes quantitative and qualitative data. About 120 psychiatrists from 8 administrative health zones of both provinces will be invited to complete an anonymous web-based survey with questions about demographics, participants' experience and interest in undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing medical education, research and scholarly activities, quality improvement, and knowledge translation. Focus group sessions will be conducted with a purposive sample of psychiatrists to collect qualitative data on their perspectives on the expansion of DME. Results Results are expected within 6 months of data collection and will inform policy options for expanding Dalhousie University’s psychiatry residency and fellowship programs using the infrastructure and human resources at distributed learning sites, leveraging opportunities regionally, especially in rural areas. Conclusions This paper proposes a comprehensive environmental scan procedure adapted from existing approaches. It does this by collecting important characteristics that affect psychiatrists' desire to be involved with research and scholarly activities, which is crucial for the DME expansion. Furthermore, its concordance with the literature facilitates interpretation and comparison. The protocol's new method also fills DME information gaps, allowing one to identify insights and patterns that may shape psychiatric education. This environmental scan's results will answer essential questions about how training programs could involve therapists outside the academic core and make the most of training experiences in semiurban and rural areas. This could help other psychiatry and medical units outside tertiary care establish residency and fellowship programs. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/46835

Psychiatrists’ Engagement in Research as a Pathway towards the Expansion of Distributed Medical Education (DME): A Regional Analysis across Two Provinces in Atlantic Canada

“…This cross-sectional study is a component of an environmental scan conducted by the DoP at Dalhousie University's Faculty of Medicine DME sites [22]. The environmental scan encompassed a diverse set of variables essential for characterizing the studied population and identifying enablers and barriers to activities that the department deemed crucial for the expansion of DME sites.…”

“…The research protocol [22] has been developed and executed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki for research involving human participants and received an exemption from the Dalhousie University Research Ethics Board in accordance with the Tri-Council Policy Statement Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans article 2.5 [25]. Participants were informed about the voluntary and anonymous nature of the study and that data collected would be used for research purposes.…”