The Future Excellence International Medical Summer School (FEIMSS) is a 5-day event for medical students held yearly in Manchester, UK. FEIMSS is the largest event of its kind in the world; the 2013 cohort was comprised of 244 students from 40 countries representing 80 universities.

To improve the image of psychiatry with 2 short lectures from a consultant and a trainee psychiatrist.

Feedback forms were distributed to delegates who attended the psychiatry talks. Answers to questions relevant to the talks were on a Likert-type scale. The sample was comprised of participants representing 11 countries from Japan to Kosovo.

25/25 (100%) of the participants responded. The feedback was exceptionally positive. For the,’Did you find the psychiatry talks interesting?’ and,’Does attending FEIMMS improve your understanding and respect for other cultures?’ questions, 23/25 (92%) respondents answered that they agree or strongly agree.

Free-text comments were also positive:

’Overall excellent and made me more inclined to psychiatry than I was before and proved to me that psychiatrists are not the boring stereotype!’

Medical student, Czech Republic

Notwithstanding the limitations of our study (which to our knowledge is the first of its kind on such an ethnically eclectic sample) our results demonstrate that a brief intervention can have positive effects on the perceptions of psychiatry of medical students from diverse cultural backgrounds.

We contend FEIMSS provides a platform to recruit medical students into psychiatry from all over the world and enables them to develop cultural competency.