Utilizing the mental health nursing workforce: A scoping review of mental health nursing clinical roles and identities.

Despite rising international needs for mental health practitioners, the mental health nursing workforce is underutilized. This is in part due to limited understandings of their roles, identities, and capabilities. This paper aimed to collate and synthesize published research on the clinical roles of mental health nurses in order to systematically clarify their professional identity and potential. We searched for eligible studies, published between 2001 and 2021, in five electronic databases. Abstracts of retrieved studies were independently screened against exclusion and inclusion criteria (primarily that studies reported on the outcomes associated with mental health nursing roles). Decisions of whether to include studies were through researcher consensus guided by the criteria. The search yielded 324 records, of which 47 were included. Retained papers primarily focused on three themes related to mental health nursing clinical roles and capabilities. Technical roles included those associated with psychotherapy, consumer safety, and diagnosis. Non-technical roles and capabilities were also described. These included emotional intelligence, advanced communication, and reduction of power differentials. Thirdly, the retained papers reported the generative contexts that influenced clinical roles. These included prolonged proximity with consumers with tensions between therapeutic and custodial roles. The results of this scoping review suggest the mental health nurses (MHNs) have a wide scope of technical skills which they employ in clinical practice. These roles are informed by a distinctive cluster of non-technical capabilities to promote the well-being of service users. They are an adaptable and underutilized component of the mental health workforce in a context of escalating unmet needs for expert mental health care.

Heutagogy: An alternative practice based learning approach.

Education has explored and utilised multiple approaches in attempts to enhance the learning and teaching opportunities available to adult learners. Traditional pedagogy has been both directly and indirectly affected by andragogy and transformational learning, consequently widening our understandings and approaches toward view teaching and learning. Within the context of nurse education, a major challenge has been to effectively apply these educational approaches to the complex, unpredictable and challenging environment of practice based learning. While not offered as a panacea to such challenges, heutagogy is offered in this discussion paper as an emerging and potentially highly congruent educational framework to place around practice based learning. Being an emergent theory its known conceptual underpinnings and possible applications to nurse education need to be explored and theoretically applied. Through placing the adult learner at the foreground of grasping learning opportunities as they unpredictability emerge from a sometimes chaotic environment, heutagogy can be argued as offering the potential to minimise many of the well published difficulties of coordinating practice with faculty teaching and learning.