Research Working Group: Closing the Very First Decade of Research and Opening the Next One!

The Research Working Group (RWG) was established in 2008 as a part of the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees (EFPT) during the EFPT Forum in Gothenburg to fill the existing gap in medical curriculum which doesn’t provide students and trainees much needed skills enabling to understand and critically assess the quality in scientific papers and research. Sounds boring to you?… The group’s work focuses on international projects with particular interest in the field of training-related issues: trainees themselves decide what’s important for them and what should be discussed with a wider audience. Have you ever been assaulted while working? We are researching the topic of violence against psychiatric trainees, going one step further and applying to this issue gender lens. Have you ever thought of how your experience in research matches your colleagues’ background from the other countries? We’re studying this in the REACT project in collaboration with EPA Early Career Psychiatrists Committee. Have you ever wondered about the brain drain phenomenon in the mental health care system? You definitely should follow updates from the Brain Drain project assessing the experiences of short-term mobility and long-term migration among psychiatric trainees across Europe. We also believe strongly in relevance of social media in regards to mental health, thus we’re launching a project focusing on how they can impact our clinical work. We want to learn experience and insight of service users, families and carers and to recognize and support the active and meaningful involvement of them in the mental health care system… And there is much, much more.

RWG main aim is to create an open, safe, inclusive space where psychiatric trainees and early career specialists can collaborate in an intercultural environment generating knowledge, sharing information, building partnerships and training young doctors with a focus on the ability to conduct and critically appraise their own research work. We’re here not to teach you statistics, but to make sure that you understand how to create environment to get the bigger picture in relation to your own research questions. To this day few publications in international peer-reviewed journals have been published by members of the group and a few more are “under construction”!

If you want to get familiar with our work I suggest to start with amazing publication “To which countries do European psychiatric trainees want to move to and why?” from the former EFPT RWG Chair, Mariana Pinto da Costa, and other 26 fantastic psychiatric trainees at that time, published in 2017 in European Psychiatry. We’re just starting the follow up to the data gathered couple of years ago by this team!

In the last 10 years RWG made over 60 presentations of different original study projects on variety of psychiatric congresses worldwide and published 11 research articles, comments, reports and letters to the Editor. And it’s only the beginning!

Anna Szczegielniak

Chair of the Research Working Group

External Relations Coordinator