ORIENTATION COURSE IN PSYCHIARTY FOR THE GENERAL PRACTITIONERS*

A large proportion of clients of General practitioners suffer from psychiatric morbidity and they are either not identified at all or are only inadequately managed because their training in psychiatry at the undergraduate level is insufficient. The training of GPs in psychiatry economically in a short course, and evaluation of such training is a challenging task. Only recently some sporadic efforts are being made to develop and evolve training programmes in an increasingly thorough manner. A 20 weeks, once a week training programme for 30 motivated GPs was conducted at NIMHANS, Bangalore in 1979-80. This training programme which was more thoroughly structured was based on the experiences from an earlier unstructured once a month, 2 year course conducted at Bangalore in 1977-78. The results were not only encouraging but also highlighted a few challenging areas for further work.