Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families

The Mind Buddy Program is a "buddy" system established between the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship and the Pediatric Residency to create a connection between the two training programs. It encourages trainees to collaborate for more effective patient care, enhances knowledge of respective fields, and strengthens inter-professional communication.

Within the VCCYF, we have always valued the connection between the brain and the body which led us to ask the question: how can we better link the two together? We found ourselves receiving more consults for the growing need of psychiatric concerns from our pediatric colleagues as recent studies have stated that 1 in 6 pediatric patients presents with a mental, behavior, or developmental disorder. A collaboration was led by Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Dr. Haley McGowan and Program Director of CAP Fellowship, Dr. Maya Strange and with help from Dr. Jim Hudziak.  Thus, Mind Body Buddies was born!

The goal of the program is to help pediatrics and child and adolescent psychiatry become a more cohesive and functional unit. It allows for pediatric residents and child psychiatry fellows to collaborate closely and delve into the details of each others’ specialties. Each child psychiatry fellow is paired with a pediatrics resident to allow for discussion of cases and foster communication that naturally exists between the two fields. The program also includes an elective one month rotation for pediatric residents within the VCCYF in the outpatient, emergency room, and consult setting to allow for a comprehensive understanding of triaging, diagnosing, and treating common psychiatric concerns. Our hope with building this program and continuing to develop it is that we can encourage inter-professional communication, collaborative care, and improve patient care within UVM and eventually, wherever our graduates continue to practice! Click here to view the full article.