Patient initiatives during the assessment and planning of psychiatric nursing in a hospital environment

The qualitative study reported in this paper aims to describe the planning and assessment of psychiatric nursing in a hospital environment. The theore tical framework consists of the three typos of psychiatric nursing outlined in a developmental model of nursing: confirmatory, educational and catalyt ic. Confirmatory psychiatric nursing is based on a hierarchical and authori tarian model. Educational psychiatric nursing is based on a professionally driven and behavioural model. Catalytic psychiatric nursing is systematic, theoretical, and research-based. Catalytic psychiatric nursing may vary, de pending on the patient's needs, from confirmatory and educational to situat ionally determined nursing. However, it always enables patient initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to describe patient initiatives during the as sessment and planning of patient care by an interdisciplinary mental health team in a psychiatric hospital environment, and the assessment and plannin g as described by nurses working in a hospital environment. The data, which were collected in two psychiatric hospitals by videotaping interdisciplina ry teamwork situations and recording interviews of nurses afterwards, consi sted of 384 pages of written text. A total of 640 sentences were identified in the text as reflecting the assessment of care by the interdisciplinary team and by the nurses working in the hospital environment. Deductive conte nt analysis techniques were used to analyse the written data. The results s howed that nursing was described by the nurses to be catalytic in 13% of th e cases, while the same nurses assessed psychiatric nursing to be most comm only educational (40%) or confirmatory (47%).