Psychiatric Nursing

Cocoon Clinic presents the opportunity to mobilize these highly trained professionals in roles that best reflect their skillset. These services can serve community youth while they await specialized services with long waitlists.  

Nursing encompasses autonomous and collaborative care of individuals of all ages, families, groups and communities, sick or well and in all settings. Nursing includes the promotion of health, prevention of illness, and the care of ill, disabled and dying people.

Advocacy, promotion of a safe environment, research, participation in shaping health policy and in patient and health systems management, and education are also key nursing roles.

(ICN, 2002) Nursing Definitions | ICN - International Council of Nurses)

Psychiatric nursing encompasses general nursing philosophies with a specialized focus on psychiatry. RPNs are highly specialized and are currently regulated only in the four western provinces and the Yukon. 

In Manitoba there are slightly over one thousand practicing RPNs in comparison to over 13,000 RNs.

The first two years of Registered Psychiatric Nursing (RPN) education are the same as Registered Nursing (RN) training, while the last two years intensively focus on mental health impacts including, but not limited to, acute mental health issues, substance use, intimate partner violence and abuse, intensive counselling, palliative care, and child and adolescent-specific training.

Psychiatric nurses hold roles in multiple settings within acute and community mental health care. 

In a hospital setting, psychiatric nurses play a vital role, leading a multi-disciplinary team in a recovery-oriented care model with the patient at the centre. 

We are unique to other practitioners in our bio-psycho-social approach to care, effectively and holistically considering all sectors of needs simultaneously. Nurses form strong bonds with patients, given the proximity, duration, and delicate nature of our care. This allows us to comprehensively note changes over time crucial to assessing the effectiveness of interventions. 

Through this process, we become the client’s champion, advocating for their needs.

Psychiatric nursing is unique in its provision of service utilizing a bio-psycho-social model. While traditional biomedical models of clinical medicine focus on pathophysiology and other biological approaches to disease, the biopsychosocial approach in our training programs emphasizes the importance of understanding human health and illness in their fullest contexts. The biopsychosocial approach systematically considers biological, psychological, and social factors and their complex interactions in understanding health, illness, and health care delivery.