PSYCHIATRIC NURSING SPECIALTY - Essay Example

PSYCHIATRIC NURSING SPECIALTY Vicky Brown School: UCLA Psychiatric nursing specialty There are different mental health conditions that militate against people of all ages and classes. Some of the commonest ones that are likely to be reported to a typical medical facility include schizophrenia, psychosis and depression (Woods, 2013). As the number of reports on these diseases increase, the need for specialists who handle the situation becomes very important. It is for this reason that psychiatric nursing specialty cannot be taken for granted.

This is because psychiatric nursing or mental health nursing is associated with a specialty in nursing with focus on people with mental illness or distress (Lindenmayer, McGurk and Mueser, 2008). Even though such psychiatric nurses have been in existence for a very long time, there continues to be changes or evolutions that are experienced in the delivery of their roles. The current stage in the specialty’s evolution can be pointed to be concentrated on the nature of management interventions that are used in treating patients.

By this, reference is being made to the introduction and use of multi-formulated interventions to care. Such multi-formulated interventions focus on the combination of psychosocial interventions, spiritual interventions, medication, and therapeutic relationships (Penades, Catalan and Salamero, 2006). In order that psychiatric nurses will be able to go about this evolution well, the body which is responsible for certification of students which is the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) has introduced a new competency area for students which aim to promote advanced practice nursing.

Once the need for the evolution was made public, there were several experts and commentators who expressed doubt at the possibility of the change being possible. The author however holds the opinion that the specialty has the potential to evolve. For those who argued that the evolution was not possible, their major point of argument was that the multi-formulated intervention was going to defeat the conservative practice where care giving had been very concentrated on specific areas of disorder (Kemp and Davis, 2006).

This should however not be seen as a reason for the failure of the evolution. The reason this is said is that mental health conditions come in many different forms and are often accompanied with the exhibition of different lines of disability. Often, these disabilities touch on several aspects of life including cognition, behavioral, psychological, social, and spiritual. In the light of this, using an isolated and focused intervention can be seen as very problematic. This is because it may be effective in addressing only components of a patient’s mental health condition and not the totality of the condition.

Meanwhile, as far as mental health is concerned, one important thing in practice is the need for the outcome of interventions to be as holistic and thorough as possible so that when conditions are treated, they would not have to reappear. With the form of evolution which has been discussed as bringing advanced practice nursing level for practitioners, there are advantages and disadvantages that it would come with. In terms of advantage, practitioners who go through the advanced practice nursing level in acquiring the multi-formulated interventions would be equipped on how to use very different interventions in handling different forms of mental health conditions.

This means this will no longer be a restricted nursing specialty area when it comes to the availability of interventions. Again, with this advanced practice nursing level, it is expected that the extent of professional and academic learning of nursing students will be advanced. This is advantageous in making them knowledgeable and competent, just as experienced in other nursing specialty areas. In terms of disadvantage, it can be said that regardless of the evolution, the psychiatric nursing specialty will still be limited to psychiatry when in actual fact, there are many different areas of care that a regular patient will report to the hospital with.

ReferencesKemp R. and Davis A. (2006). Psychological predictors of insight and compliance in psychotic patients. British Journal of Psychiatry, 16 (9):444-450.Lindenmayer J.P., McGurk S.R. and Mueser K. T. (2008). A randomized controlled trial of cognitive remediation among inpatients with persistent mental illness. Psychiatric Service, 59(5): 241-247.Penades R., Catalan R. and Salamero M. (2006). Cognitive remediation therapy for outpatients with chronic schizophrenia: a controlled and randomized study.

Schizophrenia Research, 87 (3): 323-331.Woods S.W. (2013). Chlorpromazine equivalent doses for the newer atypical antipsychotics. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 64(4): 663-667.