Psychiatric Inpatient Care

OBJECTIVE: People living in rural areas have the same incidence of mental illness but far less access to mental health services compared with people living in urban areas. This brief report describes the workforce of advanced-practice psychiatric nurses (APPNs) and explores their potential to ease the rural mentalhealth workforce shortage. 

Although acute inpatient psychiatric care has changed dramatically over the past 2 decades, little is known about how these changes have affected the quality of care, psychiatric nurse staffing, or patient outcomes. The purpose of this report is to explore the quality of care, quality of the practice environment, and adverse events as assessed by psychiatric nurses in the general hospital setting.

OBJECTIVE: Although general hospitals receive nearly 60% of

Comparing Psychiatric and Nonpsychiatric Nurse Reports on the Quality of Care in General Hospitals

Reliable and valid instruments are needed for evaluating complex inpatient psychiatric environments where psychiatric nurses work and patients get better. The Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Workforce Index (PES-NWI) is an instrument commonly used in outcomes research to measure constructs of the practice environment. However, psychometric properties of the PES-NWI have not been tested in a psychiatric nurse population. This paper examines the psychometric properties of the PES-NWI using a sample of hospital based psychiatric registered nurses.