Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing Assessing and Treating Behavioral and Mental Health Issues

Nurshing for mental health

The area of nursing practice dedicated to promoting mental health by assessing, diagnosing, and treating behavioural issues, mental illnesses, and coexisting ailments across the lifespan. A wide variety of nursing, psychological, and neurobiological studies are used in psychiatric-mental health nursing interventions to create successful results.

This type of care combines art and science (Bates et al., 2018). Determining the level of impairment, evaluating the client's coping skills, helping the client deal with the present circumstance, boosting the client's self-esteem, promoting the client's safety, enhancing the client's social support, and encouraging health and wellness are all part of the nursing care strategies and management for clients with major depression (Resnick et al., 2022). 

The Healthy People initiatives and research priorities of the National Institute of Nursing Research's 2016 Strategic Plan are in line with avoiding and reducing the burden of chronic disease through early interventions such as prevention, wellness, behaviour change, and symptom management across the lifespan.

In the present case, a patient named, Maria, is suffering from COVID-19 infection. Owing to her infection-associated symptoms, a nursing care plan was implemented. The first four areas deal with the organisational framework required for nurses to successfully apply the Core practices related to infections and will include the fundamental components such as 1) leadership support; 2) infection prevention education and training; 3) patient, family, and carer education; and 4) performance monitoring & feedback.

Standard precautions and transmission-based precautions are two action-oriented Core practices that apply to nurses and all healthcare professionals in all contexts (Carrico et al., 2018). Further, the nursing care plan may include activities including targeted education, improving on already-existing skill sets, applying new knowledge, providing a disinfected environment, and investigating ways to achieve local change through assembling teams.

Hand hygiene, environmental sanitation and disinfection, safety when administering injections and medications, risk assessment including appropriate use of all personal protective equipment, minimising potential exposures, and reprocessing of consumable medical equipment (Fallon et al., 2020).

Nursing interventions are the steps a nurse takes to carry out their patient care plan, comprising any medications, procedures, or teaching opportunities meant to increase the patient's comfort and health. These interventions might be as straightforward as changing the patient's bed and sleeping posture or as complex as psychotherapy and crisis counselling. In the evaluation and planning of patient care, nurses are crucial (Doenges et al., 2019). For instance, in the above case, it is evident that the nurse care plan's initial stage is a nursing assessment. To learn more about a patient's health and state of being, nurses may conduct tests and ask questions during the evaluation process.

Professionals ask patients for the following information

• Vital statistics
• physical issues or complaints
• external physical characteristics 
• Medical conditioning 
• current neurological condition
• The prevention of COVID infection of Maria involves a person-centred, compassionate and ethical patient-centred care approach. Person-centred care such as patient-, client-, family-, and relationship-centred care, refer to types of care that aim to correct tendencies for healthcare by overly disease-centred (taking an excessively constricting biomedical approach, focusing narrowly on pathologies, and applying disease-standardized and frequently unnecessary high-tech "solutions" that give insufficient regard to the subjective illness experiences, particular interests, or interpersonal relationships). Further, the ethical consideration should also be noted in this context. For instance, the ethical principle state that the patient should be treated as a person. Moreover, the compassionate care approach provides patient care that respects and responds to their unique choices, needs, and values and ensures that patient values drive all healthcare decisions (Entwistle and Watt, 2013).

  In the field of nursing

• professionalism goes well beyond just donning a uniform and acting courteously. It includes a set of values that are essential for raising the level of patient care while enhancing the procedures, benchmarks, and assessments that direct nursing practices every day. At any point in their career, from entry-level clinical responsibilities to senior leadership positions, working in professional environments can help nurses build valuable skills (Poorchangizi et al., 2019). Goals and beliefs that guide behaviour and serve as the foundation for decision-making are known as values. Values offer frameworks for judging behaviour in a profession and are criteria for action that are desired by specialists and professional groups. Nursing is a profession founded on moral principles, and nursing performance is determined by these principles. Altruism, autonomy, human dignity, integrity, honesty, and social justice are among the fundamental principles of nursing (Poorchangizi et al., 2019).

References

Bates, R. A., Blair, L. M., Schlegel, E. C., McGovern, C. M., Nist, M. D., Sealschott, S., & Arcoleo, K. (2018). Nursing Across the Lifespan: Implications of Lifecourse Theory for Nursing Research. Journal of pediatric health care : official publication of National Association of Pediatric Nurse Associates & Practitioners, 32(1), 92–97. 

Carrico, R. M., Garrett, H., Balcom, D., & Glowicz, J. B. (2018). Infection Prevention and Control Core Practices: A Roadmap for Nursing Practice. Nursing, 48(8), 28–29. 

Doenges, M. E., Moorhouse, M. F., & Murr, A. C. (2019). Nursing care plans: Guidelines for individualizing client care across the life span. FA Davis.

Entwistle, V. A., & Watt, I. S. (2013). Treating patients as persons: a capabilities approach to support delivery of person-centered care. The American journal of bioethics : AJOB, 13(8), 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2013.802060

Fallon, A., Dukelow, T., Kennelly, S. P., & O’Neill, D. (2020). COVID-19 in nursing homes. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, 113(6), 391-392. 

Poorchangizi, B., Borhani, F., Abbaszadeh, A., Mirzaee, M., & Farokhzadian, J. (2019). The importance of professional values from nursing students’ perspective. BMC nursing, 18, 1-7. 

Resnick, B., Haitsma, V., Kolanowski, A., Galik, E., Boltz, M., Ellis, J., ... & Eshraghi, K. (2022). Racial disparities in care interactions and clinical outcomes in black versus white nursing home residents with dementia. Journal of nursing care quality, 37(3), 282.  doi: