The Implementation of a New-Graduate Nurse Residency Training Program Directly Into Psychiatric–Mental Health Nursing

The specialty of psychiatric mental health nursing, as with all of nursing, has reached a critical shortage, which is posing a crisis in health care. Historically, the practice in schools of nursing has been to strongly encourage graduates to experience medical–surgical nursing during their first year of employment while discouraging those new graduates who may be interested in going directly into a specialty from doing so. New-graduate nurse residency training programs have focused on the general nursing areas such as critical care, emergency nursing, and medical–surgical nursing, leaving the specialty area of psychiatric mental health with less of a cadre to draw from, as attraction to these training programs is great among new-graduate nurses. The focus of this article is the description of a creative and successful new-graduate residency training program directly into psychiatric mental health nursing. The components of this program are easily replicable to other facilities and nursing specialties.