[Formal and informal tasks of community psychiatric nursing: A meta-synthesis]

Current psychiatric care relies increasingly on community mental health nursing. However, in German speaking countries there is a lack of education and training material for community psychiatric nurse. A meta-synthesis was conducted to identify central components of the tasks in this field from the nurses' perspective. We found 12 original articles which fulfilled the inclusion criteria (qualitative studies with samples of community mental health nurses). Formal tasks such as the health status assessment and the patient's medication management were identified as well as informal nursing issues such as the therapeutic relation. Community mental health nursing is on one hand characterised by a humane and therapeutic relation and on the other hand by surveillance tasks. It is concluded that training and education curricula of community psychiatric nurses must include formal tasks as well as informal issues and problems within the field.