Abstract

Like all nursing specialties, psychiatric mental health nursing is experiencing a critical shortage, which is threatening health care. In the past, schools of nursing have made it a policy to discourage new graduates who might be interested in going directly into a specialty from doing so while strongly encouraging graduates to experience medical–surgical nursing during their first year of employment. Because these training programs are very appealing to new-graduate nurses, they have concentrated on general nursing areas like critical care, emergency nursing, and medical–surgical nursing. This has left the specialty of psychiatric mental health with less of a cadre to draw from. This article is about a creative and effective new graduate residency training program that directly leads to psychiatric mental health nursing. This program's components can easily be applied to other facilities and nursing specialties.