Implementing the clinical nurse specialist role in a regional state psychiatric hospital

Clinical nurse specialists (CNSs) are essential to enhancing psychiatric-mental health nursing within state psychiatric hospital settings. This article presents a project focused on the CNSs in a state psychiatric hospital to expand their clinical role to increase the quality of care to individuals with serious mental illness and their numbers in other state psychiatric hospitals. As the patient population served in these settings becomes more complex, it is critical that advanced practice nurses are provided with appropriate updated state-of-the-art advanced knowledge and skills to collaborate within the interdisciplinary team. Furthermore, because of the complexity of the client and systems characteristics, the CNSs' clinical leadership is critical to promote the best practices in direct care services as well as provide support to various levels of nursing through staff development and training, role modeling, and mentoring of new staff.