#7211 Teaching of functional neurological disorders (FND) across all UK medical schools

<h3>Introduction</h3> Functional Neurological Disorders (FND) can cause significant morbidity and are common across clinical practice. Delayed diagnoses may worsen prognosis and strain healthcare resources. The Association of British Neurologists and the Royal College of Psychiatrists recently set out the 2023 Optimum clinical pathway for FND. However, this focused on scarce specialist resources when most FND cases are seen by doctors without specialist training in neurology or psychiatry, and evidence shows they need better training on FND. Ideally this would begin at medical school, but it is not currently known how widely FND is taught to medical students in the UK. <h3>Aims</h3> We set out to determine how many UK medical schools included FND on their curricula. Multiple sclerosis (MS) has previously been used as a comparator condition in FND studies as it has comparable incidence and likewise delayed diagnosis may worsen prognosis. Despite this, we hypothesised that traditional views of organic and non-organic illness might lead to FND appearing less often on medical school curricula. We therefore used MS as a comparator. <h3>Methods</h3> A search was made of all UK medical schools’ publicly accessible webpages about their medical school curricula for any of the following terms: ‘Functional Neurological Disorder’; ‘Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder’; ‘Conversion disorder’; Dissociative Neurological Symptoms disorder’; ‘Dissociative Neurological Symptoms disorder’. In addition, the term ‘multiple sclerosis’ was searched for as a comparator condition. An email to be sent to each of the UK medical schools, specifically requesting: If their curriculum covers either, or both, of FND or MS. Any further detail on teaching of these topics. <h3>Results</h3> The webpages of all 45 medical schools in the UK were reviewed. Results showed that of these, 9 medical schools listed ‘multiple sclerosis’ at least once. Only 2 medical school websites listed conditions in keeping with FND, however. Results from the emails sent separately to each medical school in the UK to request information on teaching of FND or MS will be compared to these results. <h3>Conclusion</h3> Our study reveals a notable absence of explicit references to two key conditions (FND and MS) on publicly accessible medical school websites. When mentioned at all, the majority mentioned MS rather than FND. We will address potential reasons for this disparity in our presentation. Additionally, we will analyse email responses from medical schools regarding the teaching of FND and MS and compare with these website findings.