Advanced practice psychiatric mental health nursing, finding our core: the therapeutic relationship in 21st century.

TOPIC Increasingly, students from various professional backgrounds are enrolling in Psychiatric Mental Health (PMH) Nursing graduate programs, especially at the post-master's level. Faculty must educate these students to provide increasingly complex care while socializing them as PMH advanced practitioners. PURPOSE To present how one online program is addressing these issues by reasserting the centrality of the relationship and by assuring it has at least equal footing with the application of a burgeoning knowledge base of neurobiology of mental illness. SOURCES Published literature from nursing and psychology. CONCLUSIONS The PMH graduate faculty believes that they have developed strategies to meet this challenge and to help build a PMH workforce that will maintain the centrality of the relationship in PMH practice.