Measuring graduate attitudes to educational preparation for practice in mental health nursing.

Concern has been expressed in recent nursing research literature and within the nursing profession about the durability and quality of psychiatric/mental health nurse education curricula. The transition from hospital-based to university-based nursing education, provided the impetus for a study that addressed problems related to the development and implementation of theoretical, clinical and educational practice experiences for students of mental health nursing. This paper describes the results of an instrument developed to measure educational satisfaction as preparation for clinical practice on the following four subscales: clinical practice; knowledge and skills; mental health nursing; teaching and learning. Significant differences were detected on the foregoing scales for younger registered nurses, for nurses registered for less than 5 years, and for registered nurses in different employment capacities. This study draws attention to the Australian need to evaluate the effectiveness of current educational preparation for mental health nursing and the methodological difficulties in such an evaluation.