Aligning an undergraduate psychological medicine subject with the mental health needs of the local region.

Providing medical students with psychological medicine information on locally prevalent mental health conditions plus practical classroom experiences in conducting mental state exams better prepares them for interacting with patients experiencing psychological distress. This novel methodology - aligning formal teaching in a subject with an evaluation utilizing a proximate student placement to provide useful feedback on the curriculum content and assess the relevance of the material taught - could be used to revise other content areas of a medical course to be more locally relevant and practically focused, and then to evaluate the success of this revision.