President's Message: Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurses: The Whole Health Connection
Around the hospital where I work, one of the catchphrases I often find myself saying under my breath is, ‘It’s the relationship, stupid’! I can’t remember who said it first…but it could have been mother of psychiatric-mental health nursing, Hildegard Peplau. (Read More)

Nurses in Action: Harness Your Relationship-Building Power
Imagine yourself just starting out as an inpatient psychiatric mental-health nurse. You are encountering patients who, for various reasons, often resist taking medications. For these new patients, the prospect of being stuck is discouraging. Plus, to you - the new nurse - the interactions with these patients seem to be going nowhere. Where do you start? (Read More)

Member News
Valerie Devereaux discusses the recipient of the Norman S. Holt Award for Nursing Excellence; Janice Goodman pens response to recent piece in the Boston Globe to support psychiatric-mental health nurses as providers of mental health care; Jacqueline Ouellette explains opposition to mandatory nursing ratio in Massachusetts; Lois Platt writes opinion piece about benzodiazepines; Judith Shindul-Rothschild discusses safe staffing ratios in Massachusetts. Learn More

Ask the Experts: Expanding the PMH RN Role/Psycho-Oncology Interventions
Last month at the APNA 32nd Annual Conference, nine posters were selected for recognition by a panel of psychiatric-mental health nurses. We spoke with poster award recipients Susan Orme, MS, RN, Teresa Setnar, MSN, RN, CPN, and Beth Corcoran, MSN, CRNP, PMHNP-BC about their work, their experience presenting, and more. (Read More)

Register Now for CPI West
This March 16-17, come to San Diego, CA for a weekend of psychopharmacology continuing education planned for nurses, by nurses. At the APNA Clinical Psychopharmacology Institute West, earn up to 10 continuing education contact hours in pharmacology while connecting with members of your psychiatric-mental health nursing community. Register now and save $50!

Snapshot of the APNA 32nd Annual Conference
Want to relive the fun and excitement of the APNA 32nd Annual Conference? The conference is best seen through the eyes of attendees, so catch up on the buzz by clicking here.

Free CE for Thanksgiving
As a gesture of gratitude for all the work you do to provide care and inspire hope, please enjoy the following session free for everyone through the end of the year:

• The Importance of Patient Engagement to Achieving Recovery
  1.0 Contact Hours
  In this session, learn about factors that affect patient-staff engagement and strategies to make therapeutic engagement the norm.

Resource Roundup

• Free CE: CPNP offers webinar designed for health care professionals seeking information on urine drug screens, their interpretation, and cross reactivity of different substances
• APNA Advocacy: Letter in Support of Plaintiffs in Lawsuit Challenging Federal Final Rule Authorizing Short-Term, Limited-Duration Insurance
• Press Release: American Psychiatric Nurses Association Releases Education to Help Nurses Prevent Suicide in Acute Care Settings
• Resource Center: Updates added to Undergraduate Education Faculty Toolkit

New Members: 584 New Members since September!

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a letter to State Medicaid Directors that outlines both existing and new opportunities for states to design innovative service delivery systems for adults with serious mental illness (SMI) and children with serious emotional disturbance (SED). The letter includes a new opportunity for states to receive authority to pay for short-term residential treatment services in an institution for mental disease (IMD) for these patients. CMS believes these opportunities offer states the flexibility to make significant improvements on access to quality behavioral health care. Full Story

Mental Health America (MHA) released its annual State of Mental Health Report, which ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on several mental health and access measures. This year, Minnesota came out on top overall with Nevada coming in 51st. The report also dives into addressing trauma in youth, and its long-term impact on performance and behavior in school. Click here to access the report.

Today, 47 states and the District of Columbia have laws allowing localities to set up assisted outpatient treatment, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group that strongly supports assisted outpatient treatment. A recent U.S. News and World Report article looks at the pros and cons of assisted outpatient treatment. Full Story

The suicide rate among the US working age population increased 34% during 2000-2016. The new report published in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) examined lifetime occupations of 22,053 people aged 16-64 years old who died by suicide in the 17 states participating in the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) in 2012 and 2015. Full Story

A pilot study suggests MRI brain scans may help predict whether older people will develop dementia, reported PsychCentral.com. In the study, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of California San Francisco used MRI brain scans to predict with 89 percent accuracy who would go on to develop dementia within three years. Full Story

The rate of emergency department visits among children and youth for mental health concerns has risen dramatically across dozens of U.S. hospitals since 2012, with the rate of mental health diagnoses notably high among black patients, according to newly released study findings. Of the more than 240,000 patients who received mental health-related diagnoses, non-Hispanic black patients were diagnosed at a rate of 78.4 per 100,000, far outpacing the rate of diagnosis for non-Hispanic whites (51.5). Hispanic patients, at a rate of 38.1 per 100,000, had the lowest rate of mental health diagnoses among the racial and ethnic groups examined, reported U.S. News & World Report. Full Story

A group of House Democrats introduced a bill to help protect millions of nurses and other health care workers from the high rates of violence they experience on the job, reported Vox.com. The new bill, called the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, would require hospitals, nursing homes, rehab centers, mental health providers, and jails to develop a workplace safety plan to protect their workers from violence they experience at the hands of patients — a surprisingly common phenomenon. The bill would also require employers to record and investigate all complaints of violence, and prohibits retaliation against employees who call 911. Full Story

Massachusetts voters have rejected strict limits on the number of patients a single nurse can care for at one time. The ballot question would have established nurse-to-patient ratios in various hospital units and set penalties for hospitals that failed to comply, reported Boston25News.com. Full Story

Webcasts of sessions from the 24th NIMH Mental Health Services Research (MHSR) Conference are now available. The MHSR is one of the nation’s premier mental health services research conferences and promotes areas of high priority for services research and identifies opportunities that have the potential for significant impact on the health and well-being of people with mental disorders. Click here to access the webcasts.

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