PIT5005 Psychiatry of the medically ill

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. 1

   Appraise the history of psychosomatic medicine and theories of adaptation to illness, including the key determinants of personal, developmental, familial, and social factors in adjusting to medical illness within key theoretical frameworks, and resultant models of care across the developmental lifespan.

2. 2

   Implement competent psychiatric assessment, interviewing and diagnostic investigation of the medically ill, attending to family, staff and systems issues with cultural sensitivity, professionalism, effective multidisciplinary teamwork and insight into complex ethical dimensions that exist in medical illness.

3. 3

   Integrate complex understanding of the biological, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions of people with medical illness to enrich the formulation of their psychiatric disorders.

4. 4

   Demonstrate an awareness of the complex interaction between mental health, physical illness and medications. 

5. 5

   Examine existentially-oriented and psychotherapeutic principles of management of the patient, their family and multidisciplinary treatment team and distinguish different mental health interventions that can be applied to optimise wellbeing, foster effective communication and harness the therapeutic environment in a general hospital medical or surgical setting.

6. 6

   Evaluate the evidence-base from research in the management of the medically ill and their families.