The move towards comprehensive nurse training in Australia thirty years ago continues to trouble many of its mental health nurses. It has been viewed as a failure by many and the profession has been judged by some commentators to have lost its preparedness for specialist care. Discourse put forward to support this negative evaluation usually centres on the recruitment of mental health nurses and a limited interest among student nurses to undertake mental health nursing because of their negative opinions towards it. Emerging from a larger ethnographic research project focused on mental health nursing practice in Australia, this article presents an analysis of the profession's current circumstances using historical print media. As we move further from the era of direct entry, specialist training, the article notes the development of assumptions within the profession. These include the idea that mental health nurses received better training in direct entry, specialist programs, and therefore were better prepared for their specialist roles. The article puts forward a critique that challenges this. The article argues the most profound change faced by the profession is the erosion of the mental health nursing identity in Australia. The loss of the stand-alone hospital system, direct entry specialist training, and specialist professional registration have left mental health nursing with a growing uncertainty about itself as the profession evolves into its (mostly) post-mental institution world. At a time when the specialty of mental health nursing is experiencing serious staff shortages throughout the developed world, the article points to the importance of using historical sources to contextualize our present circumstances.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 03 August 2016.
All research outputs
#10,323,705
of 32,443,681 outputs
Outputs from Issues in Mental Health Nursing
#375
of 1,088 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#113,011
of 336,219 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Issues in Mental Health Nursing
#5
of 16 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,443,681 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 68th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,088 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.0. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 65% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 336,219 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 66% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 16 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 68% of its contemporaries.
