[Psychiatric nursing or mental health nursing: a Flemish Job advertising analysis]

The reforms within the Flemish bachelor’s nursing education have led to the elimination of specialization tracks, including psychiatry. This has created uncertainty about the preparation of nurses for work in mental health care, partly due to vague definitions and overlap between the terms ‘psychiatric nursing’ and ‘mental health nursing’.

To gain insight into how Flemish healthcare organizations recruit nurses following the elimination of the psychiatric specialization.

Content analysis of job advertisements from the largest centralized official job database in Flanders, using terms ‘mental health care nurse’ and ‘psychiatric nurse’ without additional filter criteria.

A total of 204 relevant job advertisements were identified. The majority of job postings (54.3%) were from psychiatric and general hospitals. 20.6% of vacancies were open to both nurses and other care profiles. Only three job postings (1.5%) explicitly used the job title ‘mental health nurse’.

The analysis shows a discrepancy between the evolution towards mental health nursing and job titles used in advertisements. Specialized nursing education remains essential for addressing complex mental health care needs. The ‘new’ mental health nursing can provide a base for high-quality and future-proof healthcare education programs, while preserving valuable historical elements of psychiatric nursing.