Strategies for Mental Health Nursing Care – NUR6067 Essay Guide and Assessment Information
Assessment Titles:
Title 1: What skills does a mental health nurse need in order to promote biological, psychological, and social health and why is it important that they do?
Title 2: Practical nursing strategies and skills to prevent the dangers of reductionism in providing safe and effective care within contemporary mental health services
Module Related Code
NUR6067
Module Title
Nursing Care, Mental Health
Choose an item.
Module Learning Outcomes (LO)
Critically examine biopsychosocial approaches to mental health care showing knowledge of epidemiology, demography and wider determinates of health whilst demonstrating an understanding of mental illness as contested notion.
Systematically examine the role of a mental health nurse in holistically assessing, planning and implementing safe collaborative and effective care across a variety of settings.
Demonstrate a critical awareness of evidence-based communication strategies and their importance in gaining an understanding of the unique perspective of a person and how they could be cared for in a variety of settings.
Evaluate the interface between risk, ethics, law and service-user perspectives to establish how quality improvements are made in mental health care and mental health promotion.
Critically and analytically explore and discuss the essay titles.
Answering the above essay title and including the following elements below will allow you to demonstrate attainment of the module learning outcomes.
Things to include:
The essay cannot be written well without a particular focus, because you cannot discuss all of nursing or all of mental health services in one essay. So, although it is not stated directly in the essay question you need to pick a focus. Our suggestion is to pick a particular focus such as 1:1 time, conducting a care planning meeting (perhaps including the work before and after it), or possibly a community nurse making a first visit.
The first part of the essay question asks you to explore nursing strategies and skills. This means that the reader/marker will expect to see paragraphs that are obviously about nursing strategies and skills. The second part tells you that these skills are things that can be used to prevent the dangers of reductionism. That means that the reader/marker will expect that each paragraph will move on to offer reasons to think that these skills could have the effect of countering reductionism. The final part of the question suggests that the reader/marker will also learn how these issues sit in contemporary mental health services. It will not be enough to write some paragraphs about skills, some about reductionism and some about services. This is because each paragraph must develop an answer to the question, and the question needs you to link the three together. A lot of students struggle to understand this and lose a lot of marks (their work ends up “too descriptive” and “unapplied”). If you are in doubt, ask!
In mental health services, reductionism is often biomedical, but it is not the only way that reductionism can occur: all simple and tidy approaches to mental health are contestable. When discussing reductionism ensure this is broader than just the biomedical.
Create a conclusion that explores the answer to the essay title and demonstrates how the interface between risk, ethics, law and service-user perspectives establish how quality improvements are made in mental health care and personal practice.
Key points to remember:
Your essay should draw upon the recommended reading for the module (essays with reference lists with very few of the major recommended texts are less likely to be successful), and further references are likely to be required.
Given that sociology offers us understandings of human experience that are about power, there ought to be an element of your essay that discusses ideas about injustice and what things a nurse can do about that. That will also help you to demonstrate some learning within learning outcome 4.
In our experience, most student nurses lose a lot of marks for structure and organisation of their work. Refer to guidance on Moodle about good paragraph formation and using the technique of reverse outlining to help improve your work.
What to include in your essay:
Please see below the guidance on what you should include in your assessment:
To answer this question at level 6 it is expected that you will need to:
Reference some key texts about biopsychosocial approaches
Reference some key texts about approaches designed to specifically provide perspectives that include social context and mental health
Discuss and reference relevant specific mental health nursing values and skills. Please do not forget that this essay is about nursing skills.
Use the Equality Act 2010 and other documents to demonstrate some ethical imperatives to consider social determinants of health (so that you can include thoughts about why it is important that MHNs work in biopsychosocial ways, part of the question)
Reflect upon the extent to which mental health services are biopsychosocial, with references.
It is also recommended that you
Do not try to fix all of nursing or all mental health services in one essay! That will lead to an essay that goes from topic to topic without a unifying theme. Use a specific focus to help you get into a good level of depth. This could be a particular intervention, such as a care-planning meeting, or focus on the work of a particular team or clinical area.
Use this focus to make all the issues relevant in your essay rather than discussing all the issues and then only briefly mentioning the relevance to nursing.