NURSING6205 Mental Health

How mental health nurses can support consumer and families?

In Australia, the mental health nurses provides service in a highly specialized field and they provide care to the people with need for different mental disorders. The central focus of the mental health nurse is to provide medical and emotional support to the patients and their carers such as family in order to resolve the mental health issue and encourage for personal recovery in an effective manner (Health.nsw.gov.au, 2018). The mental health nurse provides service in different settings as well such as, hospital settings, residential care, home based care and community service. Hence they have the opportunity to interact with diverse people with different mental health issue which allows them to understand the different aspects of mental illness and provide quality care while ensuring patient safety in an effective manner (Robson et al., 2013).

According to Pickard and Fazel (2013) there are various factors that impact on the mental health of a person and contribute effectively to the development of mental disorder. Substance abuse has been identified as one of the major risk factors of mental health that requires special treatment and care from the mental health nurse in order to recover in an effective manner. However, recovery in mental health is not always associated with complete recovery rather focus on the effective management while setting proper personal goal and improve the ability to achieve expected outcomes in order to live meaningful life (Slade et al., 2014). The mental health nurses play an important role in order to involve the patients in the treatment and help them to set personal goal and get successful achievement. Beside various pharmacological treatment such non-pharmacological treatment has been found to be effective (Robson et al., 2013).

The mental health nurse mainly provide mental health assessment to identify the central issue of the patient and potential factors that have led to the development of such issues. In this regards they could use effective assessment tools such as mental state examination. It helps to introduce effective treatment based on the specific issue of the patient (Health.nsw.gov.au, 2018). Next the mental health nurse could use their communication skill to interact with the patient and communicate in order to encourage them to contribute effectively in the treatment and foster the recovery. Further they communicate with the mental health specialist to inform about the condition of the patient to identify the best practice that could help the patient to recover from the mental illness (Robson et al., 2013). In addition the mental health nurse play a vital role in advocacy behalf of the patients regarding their needs (Who.int, 2018).

Besides such medical needs the mental health nurses also focus to meet the psychological, spiritual and social needs. They provide emotional support to the families of the patient during transition period or life crisis. In addition the mental health nurses provide adequate information to the patient and their families and educate them about the importance of maintaining mental well-being so that they could understand the treatment process and involve in recovery with their own consent. Such contribution of mental health nurses help the patient with mental illness to recover in an effective manner and create awareness in the society to reduce the prevalence of mental disorder (Health.nsw.gov.au, 2018).

References:

Health.nsw.gov.au. (2018). Mental Health Nursing. [online] Available at: https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/nursing/practice/Pages/mental-health-nursing.aspx [Accessed 5 Oct. 2018].

Pickard, H. and Fazel, S., 2013. Substance abuse as a risk factor for violence in mental illness: some implications for forensic psychiatric practice and clinical ethics. Current opinion in psychiatry, 26(4), p.349.

Robson, D., Haddad, M., Gray, R. and Gournay, K., 2013. Mental health nursing and physical health care: A cross?sectional study of nurses' attitudes, practice, and perceived training needs for the physical health care of people with severe mental illness. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 22(5), pp.409-417.

Slade, M., Amering, M., Farkas, M., Hamilton, B., O'Hagan, M., Panther, G., Perkins, R., Shepherd, G., Tse, S. and Whitley, R., 2014. Uses and abuses of recovery: implementing recovery?oriented practices in mental health systems. World Psychiatry, 13(1), pp.12-20.

Who.int. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.who.int/mental_health/resources/en/Advocacy.pdf [Accessed 5 Oct. 2018].