Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing: Using Our Experience to Shape Our Future Focus

Over the past 50 years, there have been significant and widespread reforms to mental health care delivery. Complex service changes include a shift from institutional to community care, clear positioning of human rights, new models of comprehensive care and approaches including prevention, early intervention, person-centred, recovery-oriented and trauma-informed care, and peer support networks that bring lived experience to health care and the recovery journey. Mental, social, and physical health is no longer viewed separately as distinct entities, but rather as interrelated parts of a single holistic concept of health. These and other factors have impacted psychiatric mental health nursing (PMHN) roles, with PMHNs often working in complex environments with limited resources and competing demands, whilst needing to continually enhance and improve upon their knowledge of best practice and emerging issues. Professional standards, scopes of practice and ethical codes exist for PMHN, which articulate the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes to practice.