Understanding the Concept: Being a Mental Health Nurse and Its Care

This essay provides a detailed insight into the concept of being a mental health nurse, focusing on the care of psychiatric patients. A thorough literature review examines various approaches to providing effective care, achieving positive patient health outcomes, and ensuring patient recovery. The role requires complete involvement of the mental health nurse to manage the patient's condition effectively. The essay suggests different approaches for improved health outcomes and practice ethics to deliver safe nursing care to mentally ill patients, emphasizing the importance of addressing nurses' mental well-being to enhance the quality of patient care. It also highlights the need for adopting innovative models and policies, such as psychiatric mental health nursing programs and relationship-to-care policies, to improve nursing practice and patient outcomes.

Running head: THE CONCEPT OF BEING A MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
THE CONCEPT OF BEING A MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
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1THE CONCEPT OF BEING A MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
The patients suffering from mental health disorders, mental illness and psychological
dysfunction requires a close and appropriate treatment under the guidance of the health care
providers. A mental health nurse play a role of health care provider required by a
psychological patient. A credential mental health nurse requires an experience in the
particular field, and can practice for three years after that they have to reapply again for the
post of MHN (healthtimes.com.au, 2019). Mental Health Nurse (MHN) treat patients
suffering psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia. MHN is a very
rewarding job of releasing a patient from mental illness, at the same time it is very stressful
and difficult job.
Rice, Stalling and Monasterio 2019 described an approach of developing a data-
focussed policy for mental nurse role in United States. This policy interesting as it would
develop the nurses professionally and prepare mental nurses to address and treat mental
patient more effectively. From thus study, it was analysed that there was a crisis of mental
health nurses with potential capability to treat patient. Hence, from this policy, mental health
nurses would build and communicate a data driven policy with a proper emphasis on the
patient outcomes. According to Simaes and Gomes 2019, the patient suffering with high
level of mental distress requires close clinical attention by mental health nurses. The mental
nurse should be experienced and qualified enough to tackle the mental stress or disorder
of the patient. This study undertook a comparison on the personal aspect of the nurses
with hobby and without hobby to understand the psychology of the nurse as it is important
for the nurse to be mentally healthy and conscious. Hence, to maintain the superiority of
healthcare and patient safety it was necessary to ensure the mental aspect of nurses for health
programs. Australia 2019 highlighted the cultural change experienced by the mental health
nurses as no inputs were taken from them regarding the general practitioners for a patient
hence hampering the health outcome of the patient. Thus, this study is important for better

2THE CONCEPT OF BEING A MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
treatment efficacy of the patient. Australia 2019 developed an innovative model known as
Cockburn Wellbeing; to ensure that the patients are receiving proper care with the inputs
suggested by metal nurses as no such model was developed before from the nursing
perspective.
From the above literature survey, the research gap or the practice change,
which has to be adopted by mental health nurses, was highlighted. A psychiatric mental
health nursing (PMHN) program should be adopted for nursing practice with a relationship-
to-care policy to have better nursing care patient outcomes. This program will change the
nursing practice by supporting the public opinion on nursing practice, laws with respect to
the policy and the modification on the standard nursing practice (Bern-Klug 2018). This
platform will help to the nursing professionals to modify the strategy and attitude of caring
the mental patients. The findings also suggested that the nurses with mental distress have an
impact on the patient health outcome. The professional stress research suggested relaxation
activity for such nurses as a caring factor as “Everyday Uplifts” for maintaining the stress
retrieval balance which was an important change in nursing practice. This approach would
enable such nurses to increase the quality of care. An approach to accept mental health
policy can help to change the philosophy of care delivery in patients with acute mental
illness. The mental nurses should adopt an effective leadership approach to ensure the
patients well-being by effective treatment methods. The general practitioners (GP) should
be used by the mental health nurses with a lack of expertise in primary care of the patients.
This approach will help the mental nurses to underline and adopt effective care for
treatment of mental patients.
In this essay, a detail insight was provided on the concept of taking up the role of
mental health nurse for psychiatric patients. A detail literature review was conducted on

3THE CONCEPT OF BEING A MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
different ways of proving effective care to the patients in order to treat them successfully with
appropriate patient health outcomes and to make sure that the patient is recovering from the
problem. This role requires a complete involvement of the mental nurse to take control over
the patient’s condition. In this essay, different approaches were suggested for better health
outcome and practice ethics to deliver safe nursing care to the mentally ill patient.

4THE CONCEPT OF BEING A MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
References:
Australia, W., 2019. 1) Loss of nursing leadership positions in mental health services
throughout Australia.
Bern-Klug, M., 2018. Psychosocial Care Is Basic, Improves Medical Outcomes, and Can Be
Taught—But Must Be Better Understood. Journal of the American Medical Directors
Association, 19(12), pp.1033-1034.
healthtimes.com.au 2019. What is a Mental Health Nurse?. [online] Health Times. Available
at: https://healthtimes.com.au/hub/mental-health/37/guidance/nc1/what-is-a-mental-health-
nurse/539/ [Accessed 10 Mar. 2019].
Rice, M.J., Stalling, J. and Monasterio, A., 2019. Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing: Data-
Driven Policy Platform for a Psychiatric Mental Health Care Workforce. Journal of the
American Psychiatric Nurses Association, 25(1), pp.27-37.
Simães, C. and Gomes, A.R., 2019. Psychological Distress on Nurses: The Role of Personal
and Professional Characteristics. In Occupational and Environmental Safety and Health (pp.
601-610). Springer, Cham.