A mental health programme for medical students

Background: It is critical that medical educators actively address the growing mental health burden affecting medical students. The motivation to present a mental health programme to medical students at the University of Tasmania arose in response to a recent tragedy within the student body. This emphasised the necessity of developing an effective skill‐based initiative for our students. We describe a peer‐led programme targeting mental health borne from this event. The aim of this article is to outline the development of this programme and to report on the preliminary feedback.

Methods: This article presents a peer‐led programme, delivered to medical students in the fourth year of a 5‐year undergraduate degree by peers from within the student cohort. We used a multipronged approach, with the programme consisting of a five‐session workshop and a supplementary resource book. A post‐workshop survey was administered as formative evaluation. A total of 19 out of 20 participants responded to the survey.

Results and discussion: All respondents agreed that the programme helped to reduce the stigma of mental health disease in medicine and improved both peer support and self‐care practices. All students agreed that they would recommend this programme to peers, and that it provided a welcome opportunity to talk about mental health and normalised mental health concerns. Key to the success of the programme was its peer‐led nature. The programme is an example of an innovative and effective programme design that can help to guide medical educators to further support the next generation of medical practitioners with their mental health skills.