Treatment of Patients with a Mental Illness in Emergency Services

The purpose of this action research study was to examine the effects of the stigma of mental illness towards individuals with mental illness on services provided by medical professionals, specifically, registered nurses who work in an emergency department (ED). There have been numerous studies on how attitudes towards mental illness can be present in health care professionals; however, none that focused specifically on the attitudes of ED nurses. Nurses working in the ED are often the first health care professional a patient with mental illness sees and their attitude can influence the rest of the ED visit. The Opening Minds Scale for Health Care Workers (Modgill, Patten, Knaak, Kassam, & Szeto, 2014. “Opening Minds Stigma Scale for Health Care Providers (OMS-HC): Examination of Psychometric Properties and Responsiveness”) and the Caring Nurse Patient Interaction Short Form (Cossette, Cote, Pepin, Ricard, & D’Aoust, 2006. “A Dimensional Structure of Nurse-Patient Interactions from a Caring Perspective: Refinement of the Caring Nurse-Patient Interaction Scale (CNPI-Short Scale)”) were used to measure attitude towards stigma and the perception of the care a nurse gives a patient. Thirty-four nurses from two emergency departments participated in the research with the expectation of there being high levels of stigma which would in turn affect the care given to the patients with mental illness. Descriptive statistics, multiple regression and ANOVA were used to find low to moderate levels of stigma of mental illness, and these nurses had a perception of providing excellent care to their patients. This is in contrast to other studies finding moderate to high levels of stigma in general among health care professionals. This information can be useful in exploring and then using any policies and procedures present in the research sites for the benefit of other emergency departments. Additional research is planned to further review these sites and other emergency departments within the hospital network to ascertain if these results hold true, and if so, identify the dynamics involved