HNB2206 - Nursing In Mental Health

Nursing in Mental health
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1
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.

2
These scenarios have changed a lot with the introduction of policy making an inclusion of
culturally diverse people in decision-making, introduction of medical interpreters who offer
translating and interpreting services. In recent decade, Australia has made impressive start to
measure routine outcome in mental health nursing (McMurray & Clendon, 2015). Outcome
measures mainly include cognition, emotion, functioning measures of quality of life. The clinical
outcome mainly includes improvement in systematology and functioning of individuals instead
of personal recovery. The social outcome indicators were identified as participation of young,
older adults and working people from different cultures in mental health services and reduction
in stigmatisation attitude (Thornicroft & Slade, 2014).
However, currently the immigrants and refugees adolescents who are mental health
patients can access “Refugee health network of Australia” at two fold higher rate that in three
decades ago. These networks provide professionals who are specialised in refugee health. Other
organisations such as Mental Health in Multicultural Australia also offer translated sources,
which is mainly accessed by the non-English speaking communities. It includes Pakistani,
Mandarin, Cantonese and Arabic people (Minas et al., 2013). Several recent policies include
clearer focus on utilisation of the mental health resources by the CALD communities in
Australia. The mental health nursing practice has changed with the introduction of “Australian
College of Mental Health Nurses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Special Interest Group”
(Morrison-Valfre, 2016). These programs aim to develop culturally competent mental health care
services by introducing Transcultural nursing. These programs have increased the hospitals
admission rate for psychosis, dementia, Schizophrenia among the ethnic and minority’s
community in Australia (mainly people from New Zealand, Australian Aboriginals and UK)
(Stuart, 2014).