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Mental Health Nursing Research Paper

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Laurie Wharem
Mallery-Webb
English 101 23 July 2015
Changes for Arizona Correctional Health Nurses The response I am most familiar with when I tell people I work in a prison is; a wrinkled brow followed by a puzzled look and then their asking as if they had not heard right the first time; “You’re a prison nurse?” My correctional nurse coworkers have told me they often feel embarrassed to tell others where they work as a result of the mixed responses they get including the sense that correctional nursing is what a nurse does when they can’t find a “real” nursing position. So, you can imagine how happy I was when my former supervisor asked if I wanted to work with other nurses and the Arizona Nurses Association to make changes within the …show more content…

This bill supports Health professionals and Professional Standards of Practice, which means professionals are practicing within the scope of their licensure, regulated by the Arizona Board of Nursing and in a licensed institution. Correctional Facilities are not licensed, only the Mental Health units are licensed by the NCCHC. Thus, there is not a policy that prohibits retaliatory action against Correctional Nurses. With the increased movement to privatize prison healthcare and to cut cost of care, the nurses are treated like and often have less rights than an inmate.
The NCCHC originated in the early 1970s, after the American Medical Association studied incompetent health services and a lack of national standards in jails. Today, the NCCHC sets standards and presents management of a correctional health services system. This helps correctional and detention facilities define health of inmates, including mental health services and opioid treatment, and the communities they return. Increase the quality of health services, you decrease the risk of legal …show more content…

Lorry Schoenly, PhD, RN, CCHP-RN, correctional nurse consultant and manager of the correctionalnurse.net blog thinks it is a common mistake that correctional nurses are less skilled or below-standard nurses. "Actually, it takes tremendous skill to care for inmate-patients. They are likely to have significant medical and mental health conditions that have not been treated prior to incarceration. Correctional nurses must be very skilled in assessment and must have good clinical judgment to manage emergencies, acute and chronic conditions, and behavioral issues in a low resourced and ethically challenging environment that is not focused on health care as a primary mission. A lack of awareness of the challenging work conditions of correctional nurses leads to the assumption that they have less nursing skills than acute care nurses. In fact, they often have more

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