What to expect at Mental Health Placement

[RN Annalee]

The place I'll be going is a residential house where few people with mental disorder live together. There are two co-workers at the house all the time. The nurse comes to check on the residents everyday.

I am not sure what the clinical teaching assistant and the co-workers are expecting from student nurses like me. I think effective communication with the people with mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, is important. Effective listening and talking to them. Also I think motivating them to do things that they are capable of doing is important while they are on this "journey". But I cannot think of other things that I can do or should be doing at the placement.

What are expected from student nurses at mental health placements? What should we be observing? Also, what are the roles of Mental Health nurses in this kind of setting?

Please share your experiences and shed some light on this topic.

[HisKonstantine]

While my mental health rotation was in a hospital rather than a home setting, their care is still the same. Student nurses do a lot of listening in their MH rotation. We're not there to fix their problems. We're not there to make them better. We're there to listen to whatever they feel like sharing with us. These people have a lot going on in their heads and sometimes just having someone to talk to is really helpful.

So go there with an open mind and a willingness to listen and you'll be just fine. Good luck!

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

This is a conversation you need to have with your clinical instructor. It's always VERY important to know what is expected from you in any learning situation; this is what learner objectives are for. There should be some sort of learning objectives in your syllabus - but maybe they are not very clear.

You probably also need to talk about the criteria that will be used to determine whether you have met the objectives. For instance, if you have a learning objective like "Documents patient interactions related to therapeutic communication".... you'd need to know expectations @ How soon do you need to document; does your instructor need to review the documentation? If so, how do you notify him/her that it needs to be reviewed?; is there a specific format for the documentation?; .. .. and so on.

[WCSU1987]

Residential not much really goes on. I mean from my experience working in residential a lot of emphasis is placed on the psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, and social worker's. They mostly run all the group's, do intake assessments, and interview the patient's.

Did work at a therapeutic group home where we ran a few group's, did quick documentation on client we were assigned to, cooked dinner, drove them to appointments/work, and was never trained but we were allowed to administer medication. The nurse usually came in once to three times a week to load the med room up.

Nurse was at the school most of the time where the adolescents attended saw more nursing care there. From allergies to stomach aches to occasional mental health issue's more behavioral anger issue's.

In the psych hospital see nurse student's rotate in depending on their semester some can chart, not many are keen on it, pass out medication with the nurse, watch the tech's/therapist run group's. The biggest thing they do it depends on the instructor who encourages them is to sit in our activity room interact with the patient's play cards just talk to them like human beings. Outside of all that they will do vitals, which is sweet because I don't have to ha. Normally have to follow them doing vitals. Think they do blood sugars we set them up. They watch us do EKGs/Blood Draws.

Then basically sit in the back review the day review charts that's the nursing student's day in the psych hospital from what I see.