According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, there is a need for approximately 30,000 child and adolescent psychiatrists in the country. But currently there are only about 10,000 psychiatrists working in this field.
Tom Wright, MD, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the College of Medicine at Rockford, is working to change that. As the medical director for the newly expanded Rosecrance Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment Program, he’s offering students exposure to this important psychiatric field.
Rosecrance, a not-for-profit organization with centers throughout the Rockford area, provides addiction treatment services for children, youth, adults and families. Wright works with the residential substance abuse treatment center for adolescents.
To help encourage future psychiatrists, Wright, who is a former fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Institute for Juvenile Research at UIC, is developing the program into an M3 psychiatry clerkship. Says Wright, “I hope that by giving students a good training experience at Rosecrance, they might consider going into this as a field.”