Coordinating psychosocial nursing care across treatment settings

A criticism sometimes made of nurse practitioners is that they want to be or think they are doctors. Who has not heard a nurse administrator accused of having lost her nursing identity, or of a faculty person who no longer knows nursing? Before BSN degrees were common, there were stories of 4-year nurses who believed they were above providing direct care and identified only with the administrative roles on the unit. These criticisms have been made by nurses. It is only recently that nurses are recognizing that fragmentation of the profession along these and other lines disempowers us and may result in non-nurses delineating what our practice will be. Perhaps stimulated by the nursing shortage and an increased awareness of our collective power, nurses are more vocal and we are owning our identity as nurses. Psychosocial nurses, perhaps because of conflicts related to professional territory with psychiatry, psychology, and social work, or because of the ramifications of third party payments, are less likely to assume the generic title of "therapist" than in the past. More often, there seems to be a coming together of psychosocial nurses with each other and with the nursing community as a whole. This coming together enhances the potential for nurse-to-nurse communication and sets the stage to allow nursing to become the bridge needed by consumers of mental health services. I am hopeful that psychosocial nursing will meet this challenge.