Access Programs are state-level or regionally organized services that give obstetricians, family physicians, midwives, nurses, and other frontline perinatal clinicians rapid access to psychiatric expertise. Instead of referring a pregnant or postpartum patient to a psychiatrist who may be booked out for months, a clinician can call a dedicated line, speak with a perinatal psychiatrist, and receive guidance on screening, diagnosis, medication management, and referral. The model, described in earlier work in Health Affairs, is designed to build the capacity of the existing workforce rather than expand the psychiatrist workforce itself. Training is a central pillar of that capacity-building mission, and the new study set out to characterize exactly what that training looks like in practice.

The research team used a multi-method design that combined surveys of thirteen programs, semi-structured interviews with twenty-eight Access Program team members, and a review of policy and procedure documents that were either publicly available or supplied by the programs themselves. This triangulation of data sources allowed the investigators to capture both the formal, documented ambitions of each program and the lived, operational realities described by the people who deliver the training. The study received Institutional Review Board approval at Rutgers University and was funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Perigee Fund, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with a forty-two-member community advisory board advising the work.

One of the most revealing findings concerns the sheer variety of training goals. Programs articulated between one and four distinct objectives, with a mean of 2.2 goals per program. Three broad themes dominated. The first was increasing awareness and utilization of the Access Program itself, essentially using education as an outreach mechanism so that clinicians know the consultation line exists and feel confident picking up the phone. The second was increasing perinatal mental health knowledge and clinical skills, from recognizing postpartum depression and anxiety to managing psychiatric medications during pregnancy and lactation. The third, and arguably the most ambitious, was affecting clinic-level or systems-level change, embedding screening protocols, referral pathways, and collaborative care structures into the routine workflow of obstetric and primary care practices.

The educational methods deployed to pursue these goals were equally heterogeneous. Trainings were delivered both virtually and in person, a flexibility that proved essential during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the adoption of remote continuing professional development across medicine. Programs used toolkits, didactic sessions, and innovative approaches tailored to the specific setting and learner population of each program. Some emphasized Project ECHO-style videoconferencing sessions, a model in which community clinicians present real cases to a hub of specialists and receive mentorship, an approach previously documented in psychiatric workforce development literature. Others relied on one-on-one outreach, grand rounds presentations, or integration with existing quality improvement initiatives. The customization reflects a core principle of adult learning theory: education is most effective when it is anchored in the actual clinical problems and practice environments of the learners.

The learners themselves spanned the full spectrum of the perinatal care workforce. Obstetric clinicians, including obstetricians, midwives, and nurses, were the most obvious audience, given that they see pregnant and postpartum patients repeatedly and are often the first point of contact for emerging psychiatric symptoms. Primary care clinicians, who increasingly manage postpartum follow-up, were another key group. Mental health clinicians, who may lack specific training in the pharmacological and diagnostic complexities of treating psychiatric illness during pregnancy and lactation, also participated. This breadth matters because perinatal mental health problems do not respect disciplinary boundaries; a patient may disclose suicidal thoughts to her pediatrician at a newborn visit or describe panic attacks to her family physician months after delivery.

A particularly important analytical contribution of the study is its attention to alignment between goals and methods. The investigators found that in several cases, the educational methods programs chose were well matched to their stated training goals. A program aiming primarily to boost utilization of its consultation line, for example, might prioritize brief awareness-raising presentations at professional society meetings, while a program pursuing systems change might invest in longitudinal curricula and practice facilitation. The authors frame this analysis using established continuing medical education frameworks, including the widely cited outcome levels articulated by Moore and colleagues, which range from learner participation and satisfaction through knowledge and competence to performance in practice and, ultimately, patient and population health outcomes. Mapping Access Program training onto this hierarchy provides a conceptual scaffold for future evaluation.

Perhaps the most conceptually rich finding is the description of mutually reinforcing interactions between training and other Access Program components. Training does not operate in isolation. A clinician who attends a workshop on perinatal depression is more likely to call the consultation line when a difficult case arises, and each consultation call itself functions as a micro-educational encounter that builds skills and confidence. Technical assistance provided to clinics on implementing screening protocols similarly reinforces lessons from formal trainings. The study therefore conceptualizes formal training as one strand of a multicomponent intervention, with expected effects cascading from clinician awareness, knowledge, and skills through to clinic and systems change, and ultimately to improved outcomes for pregnant and postpartum people.

The stakes of this work are considerable. Meta-analytic evidence indicates that antenatal depression is associated with adverse birth outcomes in US populations, and maternal depression in pregnancy has been linked to impaired early child development. Pregnancy-related deaths data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees show that mental health conditions are a leading contributor, and the perinatal depression treatment cascade literature documents how many affected individuals never receive adequate care. Professional organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have issued clinical practice guidelines calling for universal screening and appropriate treatment of mental health conditions during pregnancy and the postpartum period, yet workforce shortages mean that most frontline clinicians receive little formal psychiatric education. Surveys of obstetrics and gynecology residency programs have documented limited psychiatric training, leaving many clinicians unprepared to manage the conditions they are expected to screen for.

The study’s authors argue that the varying training goals and approaches they documented can inform how Access Programs and other psychiatric consultation programs develop or modify their professional training offerings. The work also provides a practical framework for summarizing training activities, aligning them with program goals, and evaluating them as part of a coherent intervention rather than as isolated educational events. For a field in which perinatal mental health conditions often go unrecognized, undiagnosed, and untreated, the message is clear: building clinician capacity through thoughtfully designed, goal-aligned training, embedded within a system of consultation and support, may be one of the most scalable strategies available for transforming perinatal mental health care in the United States. As more states launch or expand Access Programs, the lessons from these fourteen programs offer a roadmap for turning psychiatric expertise into widespread clinical competence.

Subject of Research: Professional training activities of US Perinatal Psychiatry Access Programs

Article Title: Professional Training by Perinatal Psychiatry Access Programs: Multi-Method Approach to Characterize the State of the US Access Programs

Article References: Cowley, D. S., Veerakumar, E., Schaefer, A. J., Bhat, A., Sheldrick, R. C., Davis, W., Byatt, N., & Mackie, T. I. (2026). Professional Training by Perinatal Psychiatry Access Programs: Multi-Method Approach to Characterize the State of the US Access Programs. Academic Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-026-02445-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40596-026-02445-2

Keywords: perinatal mental health, psychiatry access programs, clinician training, professional development, workforce development, perinatal depression, consultation programs, continuing medical education, obstetric care, systems change, maternal health, psychiatric consultation

The study, presented under the title Tracking Pediatric Health Misinformation Clinicians Hear to Build an Institutional Response, describes a practical surveillance system built inside a large pediatric hospital. Rather than treating each misinformation encounter as an isolated event to be corrected on the spot, the CHOP team created a structured way to log those encounters, aggregate them, and analyze the patterns that emerged. The result is a feedback loop in which the questions and doubts voiced in exam rooms directly shape the educational materials the institution produces for patients, families, and its own clinicians.

The technical backbone of the system is a survey tracking tool built on REDCap, a widely used electronic data capture platform in academic medical research. The survey was distributed across CHOP clinical environments through fliers, emails, and a link embedded directly in the hospital’s electronic health record system, Epic, making it easy for busy clinicians to report misinformation they encountered during routine care. Respondents were asked what misinformation they had heard, which category it fit into, whether they felt prepared to address it, what strategies they used, and whether or not their approach worked, along with additional demographic questions about the respondent.

To make the collected data actionable, the researchers paired the survey with a Qliksense dashboard that provides real-time insights into survey entries. A multidisciplinary team, including a pediatrician, a neonatologist, public relations and marketing specialists, a data analyst, and a journalist, meets monthly to review the trending topics and decide which ones warrant new patient education content or internal clinician training. This combination of lightweight data collection, live analytics, and regular cross-disciplinary review is what transforms scattered anecdotes into an institutional response capable of keeping pace with rapidly shifting misinformation trends.

Between May 2025 and March 2026, the tracking tool recorded 234 entries from clinicians across the hospital. The single largest category was vaccine misinformation, which accounted for 53.8 percent of all entries, confirming that immunization remains the dominant battleground for pediatric health myths. Trending keywords included aluminum, acetaminophen, ADHD, and antibiotics, reflecting the specific concerns circulating in the community the hospital serves. Beyond vaccines, the topics ranged across categories such as distrust in healthcare, supplements, miracle cures, and unnecessary interventions, illustrating how broad and varied the misinformation landscape confronting pediatric clinicians has become.

The survey also yielded revealing data about how prepared clinicians feel when confronting misinformation, and how effective they actually are. On a scale of 1 to 100, respondents reported a median preparedness score of 77 in responding to misinformation from patients. Yet only 28 percent reported that their approach actually worked in changing a patient’s or family’s perspective. That gap between confidence and effectiveness is one of the study’s most striking findings, and it underscores a problem familiar to communication researchers: simply knowing the science is often not enough to counter a belief that is emotionally or socially anchored.

Experience, interestingly, cut in both directions. Median preparedness scores increased with years of practice, suggesting that seasoned clinicians feel more comfortable engaging with misinformation. However, more years in practice was associated with lower chances that their approach actually worked. The findings hint that the communication techniques that come naturally to experienced physicians may not be the ones best suited to changing minds, and that formal training in misinformation response could benefit clinicians at every career stage. It was precisely this kind of insight that informed the internal education initiatives the hospital subsequently developed.

The practical output of the tracking system has been substantial. The entries have driven the creation of new patient education and public health social media content on 28 topics, including videos and blog posts, along with seven corresponding opinion editorials published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The external-facing component is a website called Pediatric Health Chat, which contains educational information specifically designed to debunk the misinformation families reported encountering in their everyday lives. In addition, the team launched a weekly educational email on vaccine communication skills, which has run for ten weeks and counting of clinician education content informed directly by the REDCap entries.

Katie Lockwood, MD, MEd, FAAP, study author and pediatrician at CHOP, framed the approach as a way of listening to families more systematically. Looking at these trends allowed the team to see in real time what was worrying the families they care for and to give them the most up-to-date science on topics of interest, she said. Addressing pediatric health misinformation is vital to protecting the health of children, she added, and as trusted messengers, children’s hospitals have an obligation to respond. The research showed that systematically tracking the misinformation families encounter can turn clinicians’ real-world questions into effective, targeted education, even when individual corrective conversations fall short.

The implications extend well beyond a single institution. Although fewer than one-third of survey respondents said their own responses worked, the aggregated findings gave providers a clearer understanding of families’ concerns and helped guide materials for patients, families, and other clinicians. The researchers state that the approach could be replicated in other hospitals and care settings to help build trust with patients and caregivers and provide them the information they need most to keep children healthy. In an era when misinformation spreads faster than any press release, the CHOP model offers a template for meeting families where their worries actually are, using the clinical encounter itself as a sensor for the information environment surrounding children’s health.

Subject of Research: Tracking pediatric health misinformation in clinical encounters to build institutional patient education responses

Article Title: Monitoring online health misinformation can help create useful patient education content

Article References: Monitoring online health misinformation can help create useful patient education content. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: health misinformation, pediatrics, vaccine misinformation, patient education, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, American Academy of Pediatrics, clinical communication, REDCap, clinician training, public health messaging, social media, Pediatric Health Chat

The study recruited 231 patients receiving inpatient or outpatient psychiatric care and 194 mental health professionals, including specialist psychiatrists, residents, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatric nurses, and allied therapists. Patients completed validated measures of sexual functioning, psychological well-being, and communication about sexuality, while clinicians answered questions about their attitudes, clinical practice, and professional training. The patient sample was predominantly middle-aged, with affective disorders, somatoform conditions, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, sleep disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder among the most common diagnoses. Nearly nine in ten patients were taking psychotropic medication, primarily antidepressants and antipsychotics, both of which are well documented to interfere with desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction.

The scale of sexual dysfunction reported by patients was remarkable. Using the German version of the Sexual Behaviour Questionnaire, which assesses desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction over the preceding three months, 100 percent of women and 97 percent of men screened positive for at least one indicator of impaired sexual functioning. Yet only 18.7 percent of patients described themselves as sexually satisfied. Almost half reported no sexual activity at all during the previous three months, and 87 percent scored below the clinical cut-off on the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, indicating reduced psychological well-being. The authors caution that the instrument uses a low threshold and may capture mild or transient impairments, and that self-selection effects may have inflated the figures, but they argue the pattern is consistent with prior research showing markedly elevated rates of sexual dysfunction in psychiatric populations compared with the general population.

The epidemiological backdrop makes the findings more consequential. In the representative German GeSiD study, about a third of men and nearly half of women reported at least one sexual problem in the past year, and roughly 13 percent of men and 17 percent of women met ICD-11 criteria for a distressing sexual dysfunction. Among people with psychiatric disorders, prevalence estimates climb dramatically, ranging from 45 to 93 percent in depressive disorders, 33 to 75 percent in anxiety disorders, around 60 percent in schizophrenia, and 25 to 81 percent in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychotropic drugs compound the problem: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, and antipsychotics are all associated with decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, delayed orgasm, and anorgasmia, effects that can undermine treatment adherence, mood, and relationship satisfaction.

Against this clinical backdrop, the survey’s communication data are sobering. Although 62 percent of patients considered sexuality an important topic in psychiatric treatment and 44 percent wanted clinicians to initiate such discussions, only 12.5 percent reported that a clinician had addressed it, and just 19.6 percent had raised the topic themselves. Clinicians, by contrast, reported addressing sexuality far more often: 62.1 percent of specialist psychiatrists and 44 percent of psychotherapists said they actively discussed sexual health, compared with only about a quarter of residents and roughly 10 percent of nursing staff and allied professionals. This mismatch between what clinicians believe they do and what patients report experiencing echoes earlier international research and constitutes what the authors describe as a clinically and ethically relevant communication gap.

Statistical analysis revealed what drives clinicians to engage with the topic. Across all occupational groups, perceived importance of sexual health, confidence in discussing it, viewing sexuality as part of one’s professional role, and years of professional experience all significantly predicted whether clinicians actively addressed sexuality. Among physicians specifically, a multiple regression showed that greater confidence and more years of experience were the significant predictors of actively discussing sexual issues with patients. Notably, perceived adequacy of training did not predict communication behavior, suggesting that formal education is failing to translate into practice and that clinicians rely heavily on experiential learning rather than structured instruction.

The training deficit was perhaps the study’s most consistent finding. More than 80 percent of clinicians reported that sexual health had been insufficiently covered during their education, and fewer than half felt adequately trained or confident in addressing sexual issues. Only a small proportion of physicians recommended pharmacological treatment for sexual dysfunction, with 5.9 percent of residents compared with 55.6 percent of specialists doing so. The authors argue that targeted training emphasizing experiential and communication-based approaches, including role-play, simulated encounters, and supervised practice, could strengthen clinicians’ confidence where curricular content alone has not.

The study also highlights structural and interpersonal dynamics that keep sexuality out of psychiatric consultations. Patients often perceive sexual concerns as sensitive or shameful and expect clinicians to signal openness first, while clinicians cite time constraints, personal discomfort, fear of offending patients, and unclear role boundaries within multidisciplinary teams. The researchers suggest practical remedies: standardized screening items, dedicated documentation fields, supervision that addresses sexual health, and coordinated intake approaches in which designated team members are responsible for specific assessment domains. They also emphasize that clinician-initiated enquiry should be paired with an explicit statement that patients may decline to answer, preserving agency and reducing pressure.

As an exploratory pilot, the study has limitations that the authors acknowledge candidly. The sample was regionally restricted and modest in size, self-selection may have overrepresented patients concerned about sexual issues, and the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference. The Sexual Behaviour Questionnaire, though validated, was primarily evaluated in patients with schizophrenia and offers only binary male and female versions, which may introduce bias for non-binary and intersex individuals. The predominantly female patient sample and the high proportion of patients on antidepressants and antipsychotics likely inflated observed dysfunction prevalence. The authors stress that all findings should be treated as hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory.

Nevertheless, the central message is clear. Both patients and clinicians regard sexual health as important, yet conversations about it remain rare, largely because clinicians lack confidence and formal preparation. The authors call for future research on the effectiveness of educational programs and their impact on patient engagement, adherence, and therapeutic outcomes, as well as on interpersonal factors such as clinician and patient gender and age. Until then, the study stands as evidence that integrating sexual health into routine psychiatric assessment, through training, screening, and institutional support, is an essential step toward genuinely holistic, patient-centred mental health care.

Subject of Research: Communication about sexual health between psychiatric patients and mental health clinicians, and the training needed to close the gap

Article Title: Sexual Health in Psychiatry: Bridging the Communication Gap and Training Needs between Patients and Clinicians – A Cross-Sectional Exploratory Pilot Study

Article References: Schweitzer, T., Martl, P., Dubrovin Leão, D., Hammerl, L., Halms, T., Domani, K., vom Baur, S., Eder, A.-S., Rabenstein, A., Rüther, T., Hasan, A., & Gertzen, M. (2026). Sexual Health in Psychiatry: Bridging the Communication Gap and Training Needs between Patients and Clinicians – A Cross-Sectional Exploratory Pilot Study. Community Mental Health Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-026-01716-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10597-026-01716-4

Keywords: sexual health, psychiatry, sexual dysfunction, patient-clinician communication, mental health care, psychotropic medication, clinician training, medical education, survey study, well-being, antidepressants, stigma