Competence in Nursing

Nurses are able to offer holistic assessment of young people with mental health issues and their families and are able to offer short term or long term treatment either in the clinic setting or in a location suitable to the patients needs.

All nurses currently working in CAMHS in Western Australia should have additional training in issues related to working with children and young people, for example, family therapy training, cognitive behaviour therapy training, training in solution focused approaches to treatment, training in psychodynamic approaches to treatment.

Recommendation 9

Psychiatric nurses will provide a more expanded scope of

practice to increase clinical capacity and will continue to

develop additional skills and competencies to provide a

greater range of evidence based interventions and professional services for service users and their carers/ family members

RPNs will have the appropriate skills,resources and competencies to respond to the needs of service users and carers

including in the following areas:

Therapeutic interventions

* Psychosocial interventions in practice

* Counselling/ psychological therapies

including CBT

* Using interventions to work with people

with dual diagnosis/ or presenting

having engaged in DSH

* Supporting physical health of individuals

* Advocacy

* Ethnic diversity

Assessment, care planning and risk

* Advanced assessment & advanced

clinical decision making skills

* Advanced risk assessment

* Devising risk management plans in

partnership with the service user and

engaging in risk assessment and positive

risk taking

* Collaborative care planning

Working with families

* Enabling carers to work collaboratively

within mental health teams

* Working with carers and families and

using supportive interventions

An advisory/ working group comprising

of a service user, a carer and a member of

each