Integrating Psychiatric Nursing into a Baccalaureate Nursing Curriculum

Abstract

Integrated nursing curricula are believed to carry the risk of diluting psychiatric nursing content and limiting nursing students’ opportunities to gain skills in providing care for patients with psychiatric disorders, especially patients with severe mental illnesses. Also, there is fear that integrating psychiatric nursing into more broad nursing content will reduce students’ interest in graduate psychiatric nursing study and thus endanger the specialty of psychiatric nursing. This report of a restructured baccalaureate nursing program that adopted the premise of holism—mental and physical health as united—presents a different view. Psychiatric nursing content was incorporated into classroom instruction over four semesters and, with the nursing theory of modeling and role-modeling as a guide, clinical experiences were planned for all students in primary, rehabilitative, or acute care settings. Psychiatric nursing did not disappear, as had been feared. It emerged less stigmatized, more accepted by the nonpsychiatric faculty, and enthusiastically received by the students.