Effective Partnership Care Models with Advanced Practice Psychiatric Nurses.

The unmet behavioral health treatment needs of children and adolescents have become a public health crisis in the United States, with only 20% of youths obtaining assessment and intervention when indicated. Workforce shortages, including mental health professionals who can provide pharmacologic intervention within an appropriate biopsychosocial context, directly impede our ability to address this crisis. The authors examine the history, education, regulation, and practice of advanced practice psychiatric nurses and consider models of collaborative practice that can be beneficial across treatment settings in order to provide better care of vulnerable youth in ways that foster partnership rather than competition.

Counterpoint: Risks of Implementing Measurement-Based Care in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Psychiatric measurement-based care has a significant role in nonpsychiatric medical and surgical settings for identifying mental illness and plays a research role in generating aggregated data. Psychiatric illnesses are multifactorial and not uniform in nature, patient distress/suffering have a complex etiology, and appropriate treatments are varied. Measures commonly used in measurement-based care are subjective ratings of symptom severity.