Effective Partnership Care Models with Advanced Practice Psychiatric Nurses.

The unmet behavioral health treatment needs of children and adolescents have become a public health crisis in the United States, with only 20% of youths obtaining assessment and intervention when indicated. Workforce shortages, including mental health professionals who can provide pharmacologic intervention within an appropriate biopsychosocial context, directly impede our ability to address this crisis. The authors examine the history, education, regulation, and practice of advanced practice psychiatric nurses and consider models of collaborative practice that can be beneficial across treatment settings in order to provide better care of vulnerable youth in ways that foster partnership rather than competition.

Evaluation of the use of a sensory room on an adolescent inpatient unit and its impact on restraint and seclusion prevention.

TOPIC: Restraint and seclusion (R/S) reduction initiatives require multimodal efforts, particularly proactive approaches to facilitate patients' regulation. Sensory approaches are an increasingly popular method for helping patients self-regulate. A plan-do-check-act quality improvement model was used to measure practical aspects of a newly implemented sensory room on an adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit. PURPOSE: This article describes an adolescent unit's implementation processes and methods used to evaluate a sensory room and its impact on R/S use, staff-patient relationships, and patients' aggressive behaviors. SOURCES USED: Selected multidisciplinary literature on sensory rooms and R/S reduction, adolescent unit staff/patient surveys, and institutional quality metrics. CONCLUSIONS: The use of a sensory room intervention substantially decreased patients' distress and reduced R/S use and aggressive behaviors. Improvements were also found in patient and staff members' sense of safety. No differences in the quality of staff-patient relationships were found based on sensory room use. An increase in the durations of R/S did occur and was attributed to a few patients who were "high users" of R/S. Considerations for continuous program improvement and research are discussed.