UCLA Psychiatry Residency Training Program

Tracks

Tracks

Residency Expansion

The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences has historically offered residency training opportunities at two primary sites: the main UCLA campus in Westwood and the West Los Angeles VA Hospital. We also have multiple partnerships with community sites, including publicly-funded county clinics. This breadth of training has prepared our residents to provide high quality care in any treatment setting, including acute care settings such as the hospital and emergency room, longitudinal outpatient care settings like psychopharmacology and psychotherapy clinics, as well as community care settings for the underserved and socially vulnerable. 

In fall 2023, our department leadership made the decision to expand our residency training capacity from 84 residents (59 in the UCLA-based residency and 25 in the VA-based residency) to a total of 103 residents over the next 4 years. This decision was made in anticipation of the move of the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital (NPH) to its new Mid-Wilshire location in summer 2026. The new hospital will have 119 inpatient acute care psychiatric beds, roughly 60% more than the current hospital, with an additional dedicated care area for psychiatric crisis stabilization services. Department leadership made the active decision to meet the additional staffing needs of the hospital through an expansion of the residency program, highlighting its commitment to training future generations of psychiatrists. In order to minimize redundancy and maximize opportunities for each resident, the department also chose to combine the two separate residencies, which already had many areas of overlap in both their clinical and didactic curricula, into a single program with a unified vision.

 
Residency Tracks

The move of the Resnick NPH to its new Mid-Wilshire location means that there will now be 3 primary training sites rather than 2. In addition, the increased number of residents will make us, to our knowledge, the single largest psychiatry residency in the country. In considering the impact of these significant changes, we made the decision to not simply add more residents and training sites to the existing structure but rather to use this as an opportunity to rebuild our training program from the ground up. 

We have chosen to restructure the residency around four Tracks based out of each training site: the Mid-Wilshire Track, the VA Track, the Westwood Track, and the Research Track. We are hoping that this will have several effects:

  1. A Personalized Experience for Residents: Each of our primary training sites offers distinct patient populations and experiences. Allowing residents to apply to and rank between the various Tracks will help match residents to the site that they are most interested in, enriching their training and providing additional opportunities for clinical and leadership experiences in specific areas of psychiatry. 
  2. Enhanced Community and Mentorship: We hope that having multiple distinct Tracks, each with a Track Director fully dedicated to mentoring the residents within it, will allow a program of our size to still have a close-knit family feel within each Track, allowing for closer relationships between residents, more tailored support from leadership, and enhanced resilience. 
  3. Giving Residents a Home Base: Finally, having all residents rotate equally at each of our three sites would involve frequent travel between the sites. In contrast, by giving each Track a home base at one of the three training sites, we can reduce the amount of driving and give residents more time to spend caring for their patients, learning about our field, and engaging in self-care.

Overall, we believe that these Tracks will allow residents to have access to all of the advantages and connections afforded by being in a large world-class academic department while also providing the mentorship and support of a much smaller program (in other words, we will be “big enough for opportunity yet small enough for community”).

Learn more about each of our new Tracks below! (Please note that some of the rotations listed are in the planning stages and may be updated as the launch of the new structure approaches. In addition, some of the rotations may not be available until the new Mid-Wilshire hospital opens, which is currently projected for summer 2026.)