Mental Health Nursing in Community Settings

The first psychiatric nurses working in the community setting were community health nurses who developed a specialty practice in mental health. They were able to move within the community, were comfortable meeting with clients in the home or neighborhood center, were competent to act independently, used professional judgment in sometimes unanticipated situations, and possessed knowledge of community resources. The heritage of these nurses can be traced back to the European women who cared for the sick at home and American women who organized into religious and secular societies during the 1800s to visit the sick in their homes. By 1877, trained nurses worked as public health nurses visiting the homes of the poor in northeastern cities and generalist nurses made community visits to rural areas for health promotion and care of the sick (Smith, 1995).