The psychiatric nursing and mental health: the constitution needed to the competences in the nurse formation and practice

Abstract

Nowadays there are many studies in the mental health and psychiatric nursing field that describe the out of proportion reality between the nursing/mental health learning and practice besides their divergence with the national mental health politics. This stage is one of the factors that collaborate to the formation of non-critical and little politically active professionals in a Psychiatric Reform context. Furthermore there is the fact that we are inserted in a pos-modern society, in constant transformation, in which the traditional educative practices don’t sustain actions anymore to meet the contemporary needs. There was the perception that the teachers, while formulating their plans and objectives to teach, believe that they are forming capable nurses to the practice of assistance in mental health, according to the principles of the Psychiatric Reform. Nevertheless, there isn’t a definition of the pedagogical reference that sustain this teaching-learning process. Such situation has motivated this study and its goal is to face the reference of pedagogy of competences with the educators pedagogical reference and considering that educators were search subjects. The goals were to analyze the representation of the search subjects (teachers and nurses with practice) about competence; to identify the needed knowledge and the abilities that must be developed by the nurse to the construction of the competences; to identify limits and possibilities to the construction of competences to the mental health and psychiatric nursing practice learning. The theoretical elements that substantiate this investigation has had as basis the “pedagogy of the competences” and the theoretical-philosophic reference of the historical-dialectic materialism. In order to know the goal the analytical categories praxe and social relations of production were defined. The collection of data was done from focal groups and speech analysis. The empirical categories were identified: “Competence: to know how to deal with a complex situation”, “Competence and the personal and environmental resources mobilization” and “To act with competence”. The competence revealed that the nurses but they also approach the pedagogical concept of competence: personal and environmental resources mobilization to act efficiently in a determined context. The deponents have revealed a dissatisfaction with the pedagogical model applied in the general formation of the nurse and they are in a mobilization process, searching other models. They couldn’t overcome the traditional paradigms but they are in movement. It is affirmed that the mental health nursing teaching hasn’t been forming nurses for competence; although some speeches have already incorporated the new pedagogical tendencies. It is suggested that the overcome of the contradictions identified in the process become a measure of adoption of a model based in the presupposition of the pedagogy of competences.

Key words: Psychiatric nursing; Mental health; Nurses (Professional formation); Professional competence; Education (Nursing).