Dual Certification do or don't?

umbdude, MSN, APRN · Jan 10, 2020

18 hours ago, Gainzilla380 said:
Hi all,
I am currently a primary care nurse practitioner with a great deal of experience co-managing mental health and was wondering if dual certifying(completing post master PMHNP) would be worth pursuing. Does anyone have any experience with this? Would love to hear thoughts.

What do you mean by "co-managing mental health?" Are you prescribing for moderate depression & anxiety, or are you augmenting or starting folks with antipsychotics, lithium, or anticonvulsants? If it is the latter, you're technically practicing outside of your scope and it'd be advisable to pursue PMHNP certification.

Having experience alone without the proper certification will likely make you legally defenseless. If there's a need in your clinic to manage both, perhaps your employer would be willing to reimburse for a psych cert. You may also advocate your employer to contract with telepsych agencies for referrals.

Here's an article that you might find helpful.

https://www.npjournal.org/article/S1555-4155(18)31013-4/fulltext?fbclid=IwAR3c51jPpRkQNV1mYfOINvgjmES87H1C72D1ZWbh04GwtLVL-45vvAU7Mls

Gainzilla380 · Jan 10, 2020

Thanks for the thoughtful response & article UMBdude and sorry for the lazy wording!

To clarify co-manage, I work on an interdisciplinary team which includes a psychiatrist who is a wonderful teacher, as I medically manage a fair share of patients with significant psychiatric comorbidities.

From this experience, I particularly find the dynamic interplay between mental health and medicine interesting & it has sparked motivation to potentially pursue further training. Have not found much with regards to dual certifying with my research to this point, however there is a dual certification program out of UTHSC, so I might reach out to them to get a further sense of how things work.