The Metro Minnesota Council on Graduate Medical Education (MMCGME) held its 6th Annual Quality Forum in May, promoting the sharing of ideas and innovations developed by trainees across specialties and institutions within the local medical education community. It included an education session, poster competition, and reception for residents.
Yee Xiong, M.D., a second-year resident in the Hennepin-Regions Psychiatry Residency Program was one of the winners during the poster competition. She presented a poster for her project, “The Angry Patient: Training the next generation of psychiatry residents”.
Her project aims to review the effects of live in-person clinical simulation on first-year psychiatry residents. Yee experienced interactive simulation scenarios focused on de-escalation and safety considerations during her residency at the HealthPartners Clinical Simulation Center. During the simulation, residents are de-escalating situations that are often stressful in real life. Yee realized how these experiences help provide psychiatry residents with strategies to manage working with agitated patients.
For her project, she worked with the Regions Hospital Simulation Center to review data on how residents improved after going through a simulation course. The data she collected showed that residents who participated in simulation training showed significant improvement. They were better trained in verbal de-escalation techniques and better understood hospital protocols. Residents’ post evaluations showed an overall improvement in their comfort level when working with agitated patients in crises.
She hopes to further dive into research and help drive simulation-based learning among first-year psychiatry residents. She is now working on a collaborative project with the simulation team to connect simulation scenarios with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Council (ACGME) required milestones. Yee hopes to use data to help first-year residents see how they improve and achieve these milestones after going through a simulation course. Yee will be collaborating with the Regions Simulation Center to present more on the topic of using simulations to train mental health professions at the Simulation 2018 Conference on October 26-27, 2018.
Using data-driven results to provide Equitable Care
In addition to data-driven medicine, Yee is passionate about providing equitable care, especially in the Hmong community. Yee is a Hmong American, born and raised in St. Paul. An internship opportunity at the University of Minnesota helped her explore neuroscience and discover her interest in studying about human behavior. During medical school, she was intrigued by the interplay of the human brain, mind, and behaviors and pursued a career in psychiatry.
Coming from an underserved community, she knew that the stigma of mental health would only add to the burden of health care in the Hmong community in Minnesota. Even so, to her surprise, attention to mental health in the Hmong community was near non-existent. It inspired her to dive into research and to try and find answers. She uncovered that the geriatric population in the Hmong community in Minnesota are illiterate in Hmong, which in her opinion, is only a piece to the puzzle.
Driven by her passion, Yee is currently working to solve the problem of translation and misinformation. She is also working on ways to de-stigmatize mental health and making sure that screening tools for depression like PHQ2/PHQ9 are culturally appropriate. She recently presented, as a work in progress, her finding on depression among geriatric Hmong population at the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture conference. She will be presenting more of her findings at the upcoming Minnesota Medical Association Annual Conference on September 21-22, 2018 at the St. Paul River Center.