Welcome to the 22nd WCP Congress Program Scheduling

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Within the medical field, the mobility of patients and health professionals is growing. This gives rise to diverse challenges and opportunities, raising the need for cross-cultural training. In Psychiatry, this intercultural dialogue becomes even more relevant considering the differences in illness manifestations.

Early career psychiatrists have advocated for periods of training abroad to meet global health competencies, but many face difficulties in having access to such opportunities.

The Section of Early Career Psychiatrists has proposed the organization of the Exchange Programme in the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). This international exchange programme is a way of promoting the acquisition of transversal competencies and fosters the knowledge triangle (education-research-innovation). It is also a way of promoting formal and informal learning, encouraging networking and the establishment of partnerships between people from different countries (or even continents).

The WPA Early Career Psychiatrists (ECP) Exchange Programme allows psychiatric trainees and early career psychiatrists to spend a short period of time (from 2 to 6 weeks) as an observer at an institution of a host country, engaging in clinical, research or teaching activities.

This program was launched in 2021 and the first participants started their face-to-face or remote exchanges in 2022. This is a pioneer and unique programme as there is not currently any worldwide psychiatry exchange programme.

This presentation will provide an overview of this programme and the placements available in different countries. This hopes to spark the discussion on the experiences of such exchanges for the host institutions and for the participants.

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The Department of Psychiatry of the Iran University of Medical Sciences, where I work as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, is one of the main departments of Psychiatry in Iran, and was selected to be a part of WPA ECPs Exchange Program. Four ECPs from Tunisia, Morocco and Nigeria, have joined this year this program in Iran for 2-4 weeks.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of their program of activities in the Iran Psychiatry Hospital, one of the biggest referral public mental hospitals, in the Rasoul-Akram Hospital, a large interdisciplinary general hospital, and in the Brain and Cognition Clinic in Tehran, the metropolitan capital of Iran with about 20 million population.

In addition, I will discuss opportunities of this program in Iran for the guest ECPs such as being involved in education and research collaborations, being familiar with a very rich and different cultural context of psychiatric care in Iran, as well as see one of the most historical countries across the world. The benefits of the program for our department and country included getting external international feedback from the participants, keeping updated and contributing to the motivation of the local trainees and young assistant professors that by hosting colleagues from overseas also join this international collaborations in this program.

Finally, I will present some suggestions to promote this program, and will also discuss a few challenges such as financial and linguistic barriers.

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This presentation will present first hand my personal experience as participant of the first edition of the WPA Exchange Program.

Being selected as the first psychiatrist in training to conduct an intercontinental internship through the Exchange Program accredited by the World Psychiatry Association (WPA) at the popular clinical academic placement at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in 2022 was an honor.

This experience brought several reflections worth sharing, to stimulate intercultural exchange and discuss its benefits.

The presentation will describe through a personal account the reflections of the differences between services in Brazil and in UK, through the lens of a psychiatric trainee, from another culture and with an external perspective. This aims to show the enjoyment experienced during the internship, the dynamics of the services in psychiatry, and the impact of taking part in this program from a personal, academic and social perspective.

The Exchange Program is a great opportunity to increase the scientific and practical clinical and academic knowledge since it provides the exchange participant the possibility to meet and discuss with several experts and other early career psychiatrists across the world, to be embedded in another culture, dynamics and in the management of patients in a different context overseas.