The post-registration education and training of mental health nurses working in acute inpatient psychiatric settings

services is to ensure that staff are equipped with the right knowledge, skills and attitudes to deliver high-quality mental health care, as defined by the National Service Framework (NSF) (Department of Health (DoH) 1999a). This challenge is particularly daunting for services providing acute inpatient psychiatric care because of the alarming shortage of well-trained mental health nurses (DoH 1999b, Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health 1998). These shortages are especially severe in inner-city services (Ward et al 1998). Difficulties in recruiting and retaining mental health nurses to acute inpatient settings are being compounded by the lack of postregistration education and training opportunities and career prospects for mental health nurses. As a result, services cannot attract or retain highly qualified and skilled mental health nurses in acute settings (DoH 1999b). To address this problem, one of the five underpinning programmes set up to address the achievement of the NSF’s standards, and the implementation of the NHS Plan (DoH 2000), has focused on workforce planning, education and training issues for all mental health professionals working in adult mental health services. The final report of this programme’s Workforce Action Team (WAT) has recently been published (DoH 2001). This is a wide-ranging report, which sets out some potential solutions to ten key areas identified by the WAT. In this article, we focus on the provision of education and training opportunities for mental health nurses who work in acute inpatient settings. We draw on a piece of research conducted by the Mental Health Programme at the RCN Institute, in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University and Oxfordshire Mental Healthcare NHS Trust. This research has focused on a key knowledge ‘gap’ identified by the WAT report, i.e. the education and training expectations, priorities and needs of mental health nurses.