APNA Transitions in Practice Certificate Program Now Online
The APNA Transitions in Practice (ATP) Certificate Program is an online curriculum that provides foundational psychiatric-mental health nursing knowledge and skills, as well as 15 continuing education contact hours. The content is targeted to RNs as they transition from the classroom to clinical practice or from another area of nursing into psychiatric-mental health. ATP's four modules cover therapeutic engagement, psychiatric-mental health disorders, psychopharmacology, risk assessments, addictions, co-morbid disorders, recovery, and therapeutic environment. Learn More

APNA Election Results Are In
Please join us in welcoming the new members or our Board of Directors and 2016 Nominating Committee. The members will assume their new positions during the Annual Meeting and Town Hall at the APNA 29th Annual Conference, October 28-31, in Lake Buena Vista, FL. Click here to see the full list.

Track Legislation in Your State
APNA now provides our members with tailored updates on state legislative events with the new APNA State Legislative Tracking Tool. This tool filters through pending and recently passed state legislation relevant to nursing, mental health, and health care in general. To use the tool, click here to log in, then click on your state in the map. An overview of these updates can also be found in the legislative section of this newsletter.

JAPNA Boosts Visibility and Reach with Inclusion in Thomson Reuters Indexes
The Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association (JAPNA) has been selected for coverage in Thomson Reuters products and services. Read More

REGISTER for the APNA 29th Annual Conference!
The APNA Annual Conference, October 28-31, 2015 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort, Lake Buena Vista, FL, features more than three days of continuing education in psychiatric-mental health nursing. A gathering of more than 1,600 colleagues, the APNA Annual Conference is a rare opportunity to collaborate with nurses who share your passions and advance your practice with the latest clinical topics, research studies, education strategies, and best practices...not to mention earn 120+ contact hours. Register by September 15 and save $75 with the early bird rate! Learn More

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommended an increase of $323 million in its first professional judgment budget
aimed at providing Congress with a scientific estimate of what research funding is needed and can be immediately well utilized
to address Alzheimer’s disease in fiscal year 2017. Under the Alzheimer’s Accountability Act incorporated in the 2015 funding bill, a professional judgment budget for Alzheimer’s research that identifies the funding necessary to achieve annual research milestones established under the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease will be submitted each year until 2025. It will reflect the state of Alzheimer’s knowledge, and the effectively deployable investments in research identified by leading scientists as required to achieve the plan’s first goal to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer’s by 2025. Full Story

A protein previously linked to acute symptoms following a traumatic brain injury (TBI), may also be responsible for long-term complications that can result from TBI, according to research from the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). Full Story

Researchers have developed blood tests and questionnaire instruments that can predict with more than a 90% accuracy which patients will begin thinking of suicide, or attempt it. Researchers at Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine explain that people being treated for bipolar disorder and other psychiatric illnesses are at greater risk of attempting suicide. They hope the new tools might help physician’s better gauge the risk that an individual will attempt suicide. Full Story

The CDC National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) launched a new online training program, NIOSH Training for Nurses on Shift Work and Long Work Hours. This training program is the outcome of several years of work done in collaboration with healthcare stakeholders, including professional healthcare organizations and academic groups. The content is derived from the scientific literature on shift work, long work hours, sleep, and circadian rhythms. This free course is divided into two parts. Part 1 relays the health and safety risks that are associated with shift work and long work hours. Part 2 covers strategies to reduce risks including management strategies to improve the design of work schedules and the organization of the work and personal strategies for nurses. Click here for more information.

The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) is now accepting applications for its 2016 Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP). The NINR GPP is an Institutional Partnership that combines the academic environment of a university with the comprehensive research resources available at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NINR invites all PhD doctoral nursing students to consider this unique research training opportunity. Click here for more information.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) is calling for all individuals, including registered nurses (RNs), to be immunized against vaccine-preventable diseases, with the only exemptions being for medical or religious reasons. ANA’s new position on immunization aligns with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a CDC panel of medical and public health experts that advises vaccine use. Full Story

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced new steps to increase access to substance use disorder treatment services, focusing on treatment for opioid use disorder. HHS is making additional funding available to states and community health centers to expand the use of medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, and is releasing guidance to help states implement innovative approaches to substance use disorder treatment. Full Story

Georgia Southern University’s School of Nursing recently received a $1.6 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for advanced nursing education. With the funds, Georgia Southern will establish an Advanced Practice Nurse-Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioners (APN-PMHNP) track to uniquely serve the psychiatric and mental health needs of rural and underserved communities, making it the only university in the state to focus on telemedicine training, reported WJBF.com. Full Story

Nursing students at Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, NJ, are learning valuable skills from virtual patients. The online virtual clinical simulation program at TESC, which includes avatars describing their health woes, helps students determine the symptoms, diagnoses and treatment for digital patients, which then can be applied to real-life practice, reported Nurse.com. Full Story

Click here for the August State Legislative Activity Report, made available as a part of APNA's new legislative tracking system!

After months of collaborating with mental health professionals, policy experts, consumers, and family members, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), both members of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, introduced new bipartisan legislation to comprehensively overhaul and strengthen America’s mental health care system. The Mental Health Reform Act of 2015 will make critical reforms to address a lack of resources, enhance coordination, and develop meaningful solutions to improve outcomes for families dealing with mental illness. Full Story

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the "Mental Health and Safe Communities Act," a bill designed to prevent unnecessary incarceration of people with mental illness and enhance treatment and services for individuals while they are in correctional facilities and following release. The bill directs federal resources to be used for programs with proven effectiveness such as Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs, Mental Health Courts, Forensic Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) programs and other evidence-based approaches. Full Story

On July 31, 2015, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule outlining fiscal year (FY) 2016 Medicare payment policies and rates for the Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities Prospective Payment System (IPF PPS). The final rule also updates the Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities Quality Reporting (IPFQR) Program, which requires facilities to report on quality measures or incur a reduction in their annual payment update. This final rule expands the measure sets in future fiscal years, removes superfluous measures and changes certain data reporting requirements. The provisions implemented for FY 2016 are summarized here.

Mental health experts will fan out to New York City’s homeless shelters, into the streets and to other places to treat mentally ill people who exhibit violent behavior, as part of an initiative announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio. The mayor said the goal of NYC Safe, a $22 million mental health initiative, was to aggressively reach mentally ill people prone to hurting themselves or others. Various agencies, including the Department of Homeless Services and the New York Police Department, will share information with one another about those people to make sure they are being treated, reported The New York Times. Full Story

The American Psychiatric Nurses Association is Accredited as a provider of continuing nursing education by the
American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission on Accreditation.