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Over the past two decades the mental health nursing practice in Australia have
significantly changed in terms of delivering care for young people and to people from different
cultures. The essay critically analyses the impact of the change in the care delivery process in the
mental health nursing on the clinical and the psychosocial outcomes. The focus of the paper is on
the mental health care delivery for people of different culture. The essay discusses the
psychosocial outcomes of mental health nursing in this target group.
Cultural diversity in Australia continues to increase growing population of refugees and
migrants. Refugees and immigrants arrive in Australia for diverse purposes, which make the
country a multi-cultural society. Most of them belong to Vietnam, China, India, New Zealand,
UK and Italy (Kidd et al., 2015). The process of resettlement puts mental health of these people
at risk. In Australia, the mental health disorders are highly prevalent among the culturally
diverse community. This culturally diverse population was the core consideration of mental
health policy making and the funding for the implementation of the policies. However, two
decades ago the these policy statements were not translated into implementation objectives.
There was lack of sufficient funding to support implementation. In addition, there was no
reporting of the progress against policy developed for refugee and immigrant communities
(Holland, 2017).
According to De Crespigny et al. (2015), dealing with the culturally diverse people
involves challenges due to language and cultural barriers for mental health nurses. Only few
small-scale studies reported high prevalence of the mental health disorders in Indigenous,
refugee, and immigrant communities. The findings were incomplete and contradictory. These
communities were reported to underutilise the specialist private mental health services, primary
care, psychiatric disability and rehabilitation support services.

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