COVID-19 has made mental health a high priority and all nurses require critical awareness, knowledge and skill to promote mental well-being, while also responding to the needs of people who may be experiencing emotional distress.
That’s why when responding to requests from the health care community, Fanshawe College has announced that it will have a Mental Health Nursing graduate certificate program, starting in the fall.
Dr. Sarah Benbow, a professor in the School of Nursing at Fanshawe, says that while discussing with community partners, that this COVID-19 pandemic has increased the mental health needs of clients
“So really what we’re hearing from the community and from our practice partners that the pandemic is actually increasing the mental health needs of our clients and of the broader community,” she said.
Benbow says the program had been in development for years, in response to community partners, members and nurses coming forward and saying there is a need.
“We’ve been working with a team of faculty and invested community partners on this for a number of years, ” she said. “How it evolved was from needs identified by community partners, our practising nurses and members of our community, who have experienced mental health issues. They kept coming forward saying, there is a real need right now”
Pat Bethune-Davies, another professor for the school of nursing says that when people talk about mental health, they interchange it sometimes with mental illness, and this program will help nursing students understand the differences
“A lot of times people talk about mental health but really they’re interchanging it with mental illness and mental health is different from mental illness,” she said. “So we are hoping to really make that differentiation in the program and help nurses look at how to promote mental well being and mental health.”
This program will be online starting this fall and is a part-time program. When asked why to have it online instead of having a hybrid, Benbow says while they were originally going to make it hybrid, but they wanted to be flexible with the schedules of working nurses.
“We know that nurses are working shift work so we wanted to create a program that was really accommodating and flexible,” she said. “We had originally decided to do a hybrid program that would have some face to face and some online content. However, we’ve moved to solely online program delivery. During a pandemic, it’s even more important to have that flexibility and online content.”
Dr. Sandra DeLuca, the associate dean at Fanshawe’s School of Nursing says that they created this program to support nurses working on the front line
“We created this unique mental health program to support nurses who are working on the front lines of healthcare,” she says. “Nurses will be better prepared to respond to the growing mental health needs of people within our community, especially during this global pandemic.”