The Current Psychiatric Mental Health Registered Nurse Workforce

To define and describe the current psychiatric mental health registered nursing (PMHN) workforce providing care for persons with mental health and substance use conditions, evaluate sources of data relevant to this workforce, identify additional data needs, and discuss areas for action and further investigation.

This article uses currently available data, much of it unpublished, to describe the current PMHN workforce.

The available data indicate that PMHNs represent the second largest group of behavioral health professionals in the United States. As is true of the overall nursing workforce, PMHNs are aging, overwhelming female, and largely Caucasian, although the PMHN workforce is becoming more diverse as younger nurses enter the field. PMHNs are largely employed in the mental health specialty sector, and specifically in institutional settings. Similar to other behavioral health professionals, a significant shortage of PMHNs exists in rural areas. Because of data limitations and difficulty accessing the best available data on the PMHN workforce, it is often overlooked or mischaracterized in published research and government reports on the behavioral health workforce.

Although PMHNs are one of the largest groups in the behavioral health workforce, they are largely invisible in the psychiatric literature. Psychiatric nursing must correct misperceptions about the significance of the PMHN workforce and increase awareness of its importance among government agencies, large health care organizations, and within the broader nursing profession.