Inside the Push to Turn Psychiatry Residents into Research-Ready Clinician Scholars

Academic psychiatry faces a quiet but persistent problem: the pipeline of psychiatrists who can both treat patients and carry out rigorous research is thin, and the training system that is supposed to replenish it has rarely stopped to ask residents themselves what they need. A new case study published in Academic Psychiatry by Certina Ho of the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and colleagues, including Sanjeev Sockalingam and Kathleen A. Sheehan of the university’s Department of Psychiatry, takes that question seriously. The team conducted a needs assessment of psychiatry residents and fellows to understand their interests, experiences, and requirements with respect to clinician scholar training, work that was supported by the Medical Humanities Education Matching Funding Grants through Postgraduate Medical Education at the university’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

The term clinician scholar covers a spectrum of roles in which physicians combine clinical practice with scholarly activity, whether that activity is laboratory science, health services research, quality improvement, or education scholarship. In psychiatry, the stakes are unusually high. Mental illness accounts for an enormous share of the global burden of disease, yet psychiatric treatments often rest on an evidence base that is younger and thinner than that of many other medical specialties. The researchers point to earlier work, including a 2024 report in Academic Psychiatry by Bastidas-Bilbao, Ho, Sockalingam, and Sheehan, arguing that research training in psychiatry residency needs transformation to create a new pipeline of interdisciplinary researchers. The new study is the empirical groundwork for that transformation.

Methodologically, the project was designed as a quality improvement initiative rather than a conventional research study. The Office of Research Ethics at the University of Toronto deemed it a quality improvement project, and it was therefore exempt from formal research ethics review. That designation matters because it shaped how the team could gather information quickly and responsively from trainees. The investigators used two complementary data collection strategies: an online environmental-scan questionnaire distributed to psychiatry residents and fellows, and qualitative semi-structured interviews with a subset of trainees. The interviews were then subjected to thematic analysis, guided by the conceptual and design thinking framework for thematic analysis published by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke in Qualitative Psychology in 2022.

The analytical approach deserves attention because it reflects a broader shift in medical education research. Rather than treating thematic analysis as a mechanical coding exercise, the Braun and Clarke framework emphasizes reflexive, conceptually informed decisions at every stage of design, from how questions are phrased to how themes are constructed. The University of Toronto team also acknowledged the assistance of Drs. Song Min Lee, Christina Truong, and Nikhita Singhal in preparing and analyzing the qualitative interview data. Within the project itself, the authors describe a clear division of labor: Ho and Sheehan designed and directed the project, Sockalingam served as a mentor, and Ananya Garg and Eulaine Ma carried out the resident interviews and the thematic analysis that underpins the findings.

The study did not emerge in a vacuum. The University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry operates a dedicated Clinician Scholar Program, and the new needs assessment was explicitly framed as an evaluation of residents’ interests, experiences, and needs in relation to that kind of training infrastructure. Elsewhere in Canada, research-track programs for psychiatry residents have been described at three institutions in a 2014 review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry by Bhat, Leong, Lee, Voineskos, Daskalakis, Lam, and colleagues, and a 2017 report in Clinical and Investigative Medicine by Yin, Steadman, Apramian, and colleagues charted a path for training the next generation of Canadian clinician-scientists more broadly. Parallel efforts in family medicine, such as the fifteen-year outcome analysis of Canada’s first clinician scholar program published by Workman, Albert, and Norman in Canadian Family Physician in 2019, and the enhanced-skills clinician scholar program described by Lacasse and colleagues in the Canadian Medical Education Journal the same year, demonstrate that the model has been tested across disciplines.

What distinguishes the Toronto approach is its insistence on listening to trainees before building or expanding programming. Needs assessments of this kind serve a specific technical function in curriculum development: they establish the gap between the current state of training and the competencies residents will need, so that educational resources are directed at demonstrated deficits rather than assumed ones. By combining a broad questionnaire, which functions as an environmental scan of the entire training population, with in-depth interviews, the design captures both the distribution of interests across the residency cohort and the textured reasons behind individual choices. That mixed qualitative design is particularly well suited to questions where the answer is not a simple yes or no but a map of motivations, barriers, and unmet expectations.

The scholarly context also reveals why the psychiatric pipeline is fragile. A widely cited 2011 paper in Academic Medicine by Parker, Burrows, Nash, and Rosenblum argued that evaluating clinician scientist programs requires going beyond the classic Kirkpatrick framework of training evaluation, shifting the question from whether a program works to how it works. That reframing acknowledges that the outcomes of physician-researcher training, such as grant funding, publications, and sustained academic careers, unfold over decades and depend on mechanisms that simple outcome metrics cannot capture. Meanwhile, a 2017 study in BMC Medical Education by Holmes, Karlin, Stonington, and Gottheil reported the first nationwide survey of MD-PhDs in the social sciences and humanities, documenting distinct training patterns and career choices for physician-scholars whose work sits outside the biomedical laboratory. Psychiatry, which draws heavily on the social sciences, humanities, and clinical psychology, sits squarely in that interdisciplinary territory.

Indeed, the humanities dimension of the project is not incidental. The study was funded in part through a Medical Humanities Education Matching Funding Grant, and the broader literature suggests this is more than a stylistic choice. A 2018 multi-institutional survey published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by Mangione, Chakraborti, Staltari, Harrison, Tunkel, Liou, and colleagues found that medical students’ exposure to the humanities correlated with positive personal qualities and reduced burnout. For a specialty in which burnout and emotional exhaustion are well documented occupational hazards, integrating humanistic and scholarly training may serve a dual purpose: cultivating the reflective capacities that good research demands while protecting the wellbeing of the trainees themselves. The Toronto team’s framing of clinician scholarship as an educational enterprise rooted in the medical humanities signals an expansive vision of what research training can be.

The institutional footprint of the project extends beyond a single department. The author team spans the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, the Department of Psychiatry within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and University Health Network’s Toronto General Hospital and Centre for Mental Health, reflecting the multi-site reality of modern academic psychiatry in Toronto. The work was also shared with the international medical education community before publication: the team presented the project as a poster at the 2023 Association for Academic Psychiatry Annual Meeting and as an online short communication at the 2023 AMEE conference, the annual gathering of the International Association for Health Professions Education. That trajectory, from local needs assessment to international presentation to peer-reviewed publication, illustrates the standard pathway by which educational innovations are tested, disseminated, and adopted.

The corresponding author, Certina Ho, and her colleagues report no conflicts of interest, and the datasets underlying the study are not publicly available, a restriction the authors attribute to the need to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the residents and fellows who participated. For the field, the significance of the work lies less in any single data point than in its methodological stance: that the design of clinician scholar training should begin with systematic evidence about the people it is meant to serve. As departments of psychiatry worldwide grapple with how to replenish a shrinking cadre of physician-researchers, the Toronto study offers a template, pairing an environmental scan with reflexive qualitative analysis to surface what residents actually want from research training, what they have experienced so far, and where the gaps lie. The next step, translating those findings into curricula that measurably expand the pipeline of interdisciplinary psychiatric researchers, is the challenge the team’s earlier work has already set in motion.

Subject of Research: Needs assessment of psychiatry residents' interests, experiences, and training needs for clinician scholar development

Article Title: Training the Next Generation of Clinician Scholars in Psychiatry: Understanding Residents’ Interests, Experiences, and Needs

Article References: Ho, C., Ma, E., Garg, A., Sockalingam, S., & Sheehan, K. A. (2026). Training the Next Generation of Clinician Scholars in Psychiatry: Understanding Residents’ Interests, Experiences, and Needs. Academic Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-026-02414-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40596-026-02414-9

Keywords: psychiatry residency, clinician scholar, medical education, research training, thematic analysis, needs assessment, qualitative research, physician-scientist pipeline, University of Toronto, academic psychiatry, medical humanities, curriculum development