Back to the future? Views of heads of schools of nursing about undergraduate specialization in mental health nursing

The move towards comprehensive nurse training in Australia thirty years ago continues to trouble many of its mental health nurses. It has been viewed as a failure by many and the profession has been judged by some commentators to have lost its preparedness for specialist care. Discourse put forward to support this negative evaluation usually centres on the recruitment of mental health nurses and a limited interest among student nurses to undertake mental health nursing because of their negative opinions towards it. Emerging from a larger ethnographic research project focused on mental health nursing practice in Australia, this article presents an analysis of the profession's current circumstances using historical print media. As we move further from the era of direct entry, specialist training, the article notes the development of assumptions within the profession. These include the idea that mental health nurses received better training in direct entry, specialist programs, and therefore were better prepared for their specialist roles. The article puts forward a critique that challenges this. The article argues the most profound change faced by the profession is the erosion of the mental health nursing identity in Australia. The loss of the stand-alone hospital system, direct entry specialist training, and specialist professional registration have left mental health nursing with a growing uncertainty about itself as the profession evolves into its (mostly) post-mental institution world. At a time when the specialty of mental health nursing is experiencing serious staff shortages throughout the developed world, the article points to the importance of using historical sources to contextualize our present circumstances.

Section: Doxic Assumptions Within Mental Health Nursingmentioning

confidence: 99%

More Satisfying Than Factory Work: An Analysis of Mental Health Nursing Using a Print Media Archive

Molloy

Lakeman

Walker

2016

“…Hercelinskyj, Cruickhsnak, Brown and Phillips (2014) suggest that accurately defining the role of mental health nurses would help with recruitment and retention of nurses, which is currently problematic in the UK. Mental health nurses need to take opportunities to emphasise the value and significance of their specialist knowledge and skills, which Happell and McAllister (2014) suggest the quality of service users' care depends on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Too Busy to Talk: Examining Service User Involvement in Nursing Work

Terry

Coffey

2019

Traditional ideas of mental health nursing are challenged in contemporary healthcare settings by developments focused on more partnership and collaboration with people using mental health services. Yet service users have reported limited involvement in planning their own care. The purpose of this research was to explore accounts from multiple perspectives about service user involvement in mental health nursing processes. Qualitative research interviews and focus groups with mental health nursing students (n=18), qualified nurses (n=17) and service users (n=13) were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants' transcribed talk was thematically analysed to examine understandings about service user involvement and mental health nursing. Nursing work was often described as task-focused, with limited collaboration with service users in areas like care planning. Service user involvement was seldom mentioned by nurses themselves, indicating it did not form an important part of mental health nursing processes. Mental health nurses appear to be complicit in care processes that do not include involvement of service users and may discourage novice practitioners from attempts at engagement.

Moving Beyond Routines in Teaching and Learning: Releasing the Educative Potential of Published Eating Disorder Memoirs

Brien

McAllister

2017

Learning from the lived experience of disordered eating is vital for contemporary mental health practitioners. While mental health practitioners need to understand the psycho-biological issues that impact the person and family with an eating disorder, there is much about this complex condition that eludes and escapes a bio-medical perspective. Use of an aesthetic lens on the issue can illuminate various challenges, tensions and insights that people with disordered eating experience along the journey of their ill-health and on to their recovery, but which often remain unstated in the clinical context. Scholars within the creative arts discipline are experts in making judgements about the quality of artworks they encounter and have highly developed aesthetic knowing. Yet, the central skills and knowledges embodied in creative arts activity are not widely utilized outside that sphere. This article reports on how aesthetics can be applied to sensitize mental health practitioners to appreciate the lived experience of a mental health challenge such as an eating disorder. Such mental health practitioners play an important role in the health service, yet the widespread diffusion of the bio-medical model into mental health, once characterized for its equal emphasis on the psycho-social-cultural, has led to criticisms of an over-focus on illness identification, at the expense of accommodating the meanings of subjective and unique experiences of mental health, struggle and recovery. Using Kate Grenville's typology of the elements of effective creative writing, we show how these elements contribute to the aesthetic power and impact of particular eating disorder memoirs.