Mph

[markglt]

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very generic question...any utility for a psychiatrist to obtain an mph?

 

[shan564]

What are you planning to do with it? If you want to go into administration, it can be a useful thing to have on your CV. In terms of actual educational value, I don't think you learn a whole lot that you didn't already learn in med school and residency.

Also, take my advice with a grain of salt... that statement is based on my experience, which is limited to helping a friend with a lot of his MPH coursework (his English wasn't great, so I proofread all of his papers... and as a result, I had a chance to look over every single assignment). So it might just be that this wasn't a great MPH program.

 

[Fastball32]

I think it would bring a very minimal educational value, and it wouldn't really help with Fellowship applications. I could see it helping down the road, if you want to be a Medical Director of a place your working at. Anything that separates yourself could lead to promotions.

 

[splik]

yes, I have an MPH! You would have to go to one of the schools that is used to training physicians as we have different needs from the non-medics and there are only a few of those programs (Harvard, Hopkins, Columbia, UNC-Chapel Hill, UW, Berkeley are the main ones, maybe Michigan and Emory) and have a specific concentration in mind. If you are interested in health services research or psychiatric epidemiology then you will get your basic epidemiological training and a chance to do some research projects. If you are interested in mental health policy and working at the state or national level or influencing organizations then doing health policy would be useful. If you are more interested in management and administration then you would be better off doing an MBA. One of my attendings who also has an MPH (like a lot of psychiatrists and residents at my program) said he wish he had done an MBA instead. Global health is a bit of a non-concentration really. Enviromental health is not really relevant to psychiatry.

I think the naysayers are wrong. there isn't much you would learn at a decent public health school that you would learn at medschool and you can definitely learn some pragmatic stuff that would be useful - e.g. program planning and evaluation, designing surveys, quality improvement stuff, how to evaluate interventions, doing health needs assessments, how to analyze epidemiological datasets, how to develop new psychiatric rating scales, and it is useful to understand how us healthcare policy works etc. It is just there are very few schools that can offer what you might need, and you could probably learn most of this (except maybe statistics or epidemiology) on your own or through practical experience in the field.

 

[SmallBird]

I think it would bring a very minimal educational value.

Why do you think this? I am strongly considering an MPH myself, and looking at the detailed curriculums of some programs, I can't see that I covered any of it in med school.

 

[notdeadyet]

Why do you think this? I am strongly considering an MPH myself, and looking at the detailed curriculums of some programs, I can't see that I covered any of it in med school.

There aren't a lot of standardized public health requirements in medical school, so I how much public health exposure and training you had is going vary wildly from one school to the next. Some schools don't put a lot of emphasis in public health while others do. Mine did, so I don't have a lot of interest in an MPH. If I went to a school that didn't emphasize it so much, I might have more interest.

 

[shan564]

There aren't a lot of standardized public health requirements in medical school, so I how much public health exposure and training you had is going vary wildly from one school to the next. Some schools don't put a lot of emphasis in public health while others do. Mine did, so I don't have a lot of interest in an MPH. If I went to a school that didn't emphasize it so much, I might have more interest.

Yeah, I think that's probably why my experience is somewhat jaded. We had a lot of public health teaching in our 1st/2nd years of med school, and because of that training, we learned how to apply it in 3rd/4th years. Combine that with the fact that my MPH friend apparently went to a not-so-great program, and it makes an MPH seem like a waste of time. But other people's experience seems to disagree with mine.

 

[markglt]

thanks for the feedback. 👍
looking into health policy...