I’ve spent quite a bit of time working as a psyche nurse as part of my role as a float/ resource pool nurse. It’s safe to say that unless you are attacked by a patient, it’s one of the nursing positions that is among the least physically demanding. Of course, with the added potential where you can literally be fighting for your life, you won’t be put in situations where you are regularly damaging your body like you would on a medical floor. And as far as being attacked, I would say the ER puts me in many more positions where I am dealing with out of control patients vs. when they put me on the psyche unit. Here’s an interesting thing I realized once I looked around me at work at the tiny little nurses... they rarely ever seem to get mixed up in physical altercations with patients. There are exceptions to everything, but I really never see it happening. It’s because they go into situations knowing they are small and weak, and it casts a shadow over all their interactions in such a way that they handle powder keg situations in ways that don’t escalate, vs the way I used to do things by walking in and knowing that I could rely on size and sheer brutality on my part if it came to that. It should be obvious which approach consistently promotes safer outcomes, but if it isn’t, then I’ll point out that it’s the gentler approach that does. My feelings are that 95% of violent situations can be prevented with the right approach. And there’s a difference between the right approach and a weak approach. If you have teammates around you that work smarter and not harder, then a psyche unit can be a place that is 95% safer than it would be if your coworkers don’t handle patients well. You need cooperation and resources behind you to make that happen, but I feel like it’s becoming more common to get the recipe right. So that leaves 5% of the time where you could get your back hurt, but then again, you could get mugged walking into work too, so there isn’t a way to insulate yourself from all potential injurious situations. The key is reducing the likelihood down as far as you can. Long story short, it’s a lot less wear and tear compared to just about any other hands on nursing work, unless you get attacked, which can happen on any other unit, and be just as bad, if not worse.
Typical day?
Show up, get report from the previous shift, start working on meeting your patients and assessing them, talking to them, checking on how things are going, pass meds out, discharge patients and admit new patients (which consists of asking lots of questions and filling out paperwork), going to meetings where you discuss he patient’s progress with the multidisciplinary team of physicians, social workers, nurses, and therapists... managing patients medical needs and changing bandages if hey have self inflicted injuries, answering he phone, making calls to find resources to help patients that are returning to the community, leading therapy sessions, etc, etc.
A good way to distinguish mental health nursing from many other nursing units is by covering what mental health nurses don’t do very much of. Stuff they don’t seem to do as much as the medical side include having to pull immobile patients out of bed, get them to the bathroom, deal with huge messes and cleanup, answer call lights and be at the literal mercy of endless patient requests that have to be accommodated, constant monitoring of tons of things that could be going wrong right before your eyes, family members in the room making life hard, and patients doing something stupid that makes their condition worse. There is just so much less (or none at all) of the battle against gravity that goes on when a heavy patient can’t do much for themselves. I bend, squat, pull, lift, slip, jog, stand up, walk, and tug all day on other units when I’m assigned off the mental health floor. On the mental health floor, I stand up and sit down a lot, and spend a lot of my day in a chair. It’s a good life for the folks working permanently on mental health. Sometimes it’s tedious when you have patients that are always asking for things, or wandering, or causing angst among their peers, but it’s not much worse than having a room full of patients family in a medical floor complaining about stupid things, and watching your every move to critique you. I cherish the time that I get to hang out with the folks on the “crazy” floor. They don’t seem so crazy compared to the other floors. It can be a little slice of heaven.
