Creating an Integrated Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing Clinical Experience

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.