title: Creating an integrated psychiatric-mental health nursing clinical experience.
abstract: Preparing baccalaureate nursing students to deliver care to an increasingly complex patient population is an ongoing challenge for nursing educators. Wanting to provide their students with a more holistic approach to patient care, undergraduate psychiatric-mental health nursing course faculty created a clinical rotation to address the needs of psychiatric patients who also had 1 or more medical comorbidities. In this article, we describe a pilot project in which students volunteered to participate in a 24-hour clinical experience focused on assessing and addressing the mental health needs of patients admitted to a medical or surgical clinical unit. Evaluation of this approach indicates that the predominant clinical and educational model of specialized healthcare undermines a single course approach to integrated care.
authors.affiliation: School of Nursing, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA. dwightfaught@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Dwight D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Faught
authors.forename: D Patricia
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: Gray
authors.forename: Carleen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: DiMeglio
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Meadows
authors.forename: Victoria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Menzies
mesh_terms: D003479:Curriculum; D019033:Delivery of Health Care, Integrated; D004508:Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D015402:Nursing Education Research; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D009936:Organizational Innovation; D010865:Pilot Projects; D011568:Psychiatric Nursing / Q000193:education*