APNA's Year in Review: 2016 Annual Activity Report
The 2016 APNA Annual Activity Report is now available. The President, Treasurer, Secretary have each provided reports which speak to key APNA activities from the past year. Supplemental reports in the Appendix offer a comprehensive look at council accomplishments, continuing education programs, financial statements, and more. Click here to access the report.

PMH Toolkit for Undergraduate Nursing Education
Our members identified a need to highlight the essential psychiatric-mental health content in undergraduate nursing education as programs move towards integrated curricula. Plus, evolving educational approaches mean a need for innovative resources to help teach this content. The APNA Board of Directors charged the Undergraduate Branch of the APNA Education Council with developing a toolkit for undergraduate nursing faculty, now available online, to help address this changing landscape.

These expert educators identified and defined 13 areas of core psychiatric-mental health nursing content which align with both the Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice (2014) and the Essentials of Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing in the BSN Curriculum (2008), as shown in this crosswalk table. In this toolkit, they provide expert-vetted teaching exemplars, real ideas, and resources for each content area to supplement traditional psychiatric-mental health nursing text. You can view the toolkit here.

APNA Opioid Education Survey 2016
APNA is gathering information that will inform the Board of Directors in the development of positions, programs and services related to opioid addiction. We are seeking your input. Please answer a few questions by clicking here - it will only take 5 minutes.

Annual Conference Content Available in the Online Poster Gallery
You can see this year’s Annual Conference poster presentations with our Online Poster Gallery. Search by keyword, browse by topic, or search by name to find a colleague's poster. This gallery is an enduring collection of hundreds of poster presentations targeted to psychiatric-mental health nurses. Click here to access the Gallery.

Scientists have pinpointed several schizophrenia-related gene variants that alter expression of other genes in illness-implicated circuitry of the human brain. Under-expression of a few of them stunted brain development in model systems in this largest study of its kind. The study is the first from the CommonMind Consortium (CMC)  , a public-private psychiatric research data source co-founded and co-funded by NIMH. Full Story

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) will be awarding up to $215 million in funding over several years for treatment services addressing the behavioral health needs of children, adolescents, young adults, and their families. These treatment services address a wide range of behavioral health issues affecting young people and families revolving around substance use and serious emotional disturbances. Full Story

New research suggests MRI scans and a questionnaire can help health professionals predict which patients are likely to be helped by antidepressants. In the new study, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine successfully predicted with 80% accuracy whether antidepressants would help patients recover from depression, reported PsychCentral.com. Full Story

A shortage of mental health resources is putting undue stress on hospital emergency departments as holding areas for some of the most vulnerable patients they serve. An online survey of 1,716 emergency physicians from across the nation paints a grim scene of psychiatric patients waiting long hours, and even days, for an inpatient psychiatric bed, reported HealthLeadersMedia.com. Full Story

ANA's Nurses by the Numbers is a free new resource, the first of an annual series that will highlight curated Federal data on registered nurses. The 2016 edition focuses on RN/APRN employment and wages using data from the Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click here to access the report.

The NACNS 2016 CNS Census will provide information on how nurses with CNS education and experience are contributing to the health care system. The results will be published and NACNS plans to make an infographic available on its website. This survey is open to all nurses who identify themselves as or who were educated as Clinical Nurse Specialists (CNSs).  If you are a student, you are welcome to take the CNS Census. NACNS is encouraging all nurses who meet those criteria to complete the survey before December 31 of this year. Click here to participate.

The Joining Forces initiative is hosting a series of webinars during the week of Veterans Day 2016 (Nov. 7-11). These hour-long presentations from multiple organizations will focus on topics regarding the health of Service members and Veterans. Click here to view the schedule and register.

A novel way of delivering healthcare services to the severely mentally ill may prevent the predictable downward spiral to homelessness, provided patients have a home where these services can be delivered and a family member who can provide psychosocial support, preliminary results suggest. "The basis of all our work is the network meeting, which is typically a 90-minute meeting conducted in an open dialogue style with the client, the family, in the patient's home, along with a peer or a social worker or a family therapist or a psychiatrist," James Mills, LCSW, Visiting Nurse Service of New York, in New York City, told Medscape Medical News. Full Story

By the time current U Penn pre-med undergraduates attend medical school, they will be studying completely new primary health curricula, thanks to Penn's new Center for Integrated Behavioral Health in Primary Care. Penn Medicine received a five-year, $3.7 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to establish the new center at the Perelman School of Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, in conjunction with Department of Psychiatry and the School of Nursing, reported The Daily Pennsylvanian. Full Story

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has issued new reporting requirements for physicians who will be authorized to prescribe the opioid use disorder treatment medication buprenorphine at the new limit of 275 patients.  The requirements, published in the Federal Register, are a key step in increasing access to medication-assisted treatment for opioid-related disorders. Full Story

California doctors will be required to check a database of prescription narcotics before writing scripts for addictive drugs under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown signed that aims to address opioid use disorder. The measure attempts to crack down on a practice known as "doctor-shopping," reported NBCBayArea.com. Full Story

Mental Health America (MHA) shared some staggering new numbers related to depression in America, drawn from one of the most ambitious mental health screening programs ever launched. “The sheer volume of individuals seeking mental health screening and supports is astonishing,” said Paul Gionfriddo, president and CEO, MHA. “But when you couple this volume with these facts – that the depression screening tool is the most common screening tool they use; that most depression screeners are young; that two in every five depression screeners have severe depression; and that the majority of people coming to our screening program have never been diagnosed with a mental health condition—this is a national wake-up call. We must demand better mental health services—practitioners, employers, and educators need to offer mental health screening to all children and adults and policy makers must pass meaningful mental health reform legislation that emphasizes earlier detection and integrated services for recovery.” 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.