Nurse Practitioner Certification Examination Development: From Reflecting Clinical Practice to Ensuring Lifelong Learning.

Objective: Certifications in psychiatric-mental health nursing promote safe practice by psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) and nurses (PMHNs) and help protect the public from harm. This protection begins with the development of an examination that meets rigorous national education, practice, and accreditation standards and reflects PMHNPs' or PMHNs' clinical practice. Achievement and maintenance of a certification is a journey that involves a commitment to lifelong learning and the improvement of the field of psychiatric-mental health nursing through involvement in the examination process.

CPD providers can positively impact practice by better understanding how APNs are educated, licenced, and certified.

Advanced practice nurses (APNs) care for various patient populations in a wide variety of settings. The four types of APNs in the USA (certified nurse practitioner, clinical nurse specialist, certified nurse-midwife, and certified registered nurse anaesthetist) have differences and commonalities related to education, licensure, and certification. Care provided by APNs has been demonstrated to be of high quality, and APNs are active and engaged participants in continuing professional development (CPD) as CPD is required to maintain licensure and board certification.

Exploring alternative forms of scholarship for nurse educators' success.

Background: Teaching-intensive universities require faculty to have increased teaching workloads. Nursing faculty have additional burdens that faculty members in other disciplines and departments do not experience, making it difficult to produce scholarship as it has been traditionally defined in research-intensive universities. Teaching-intensive universities should begin to rethink nursing faculty expectations for meeting their universities' missions of scholarship, especially those required for tenure.

Metabolic Syndrome Identification in Patients Treated With Second-Generation Antipsychotic Medications.

The purpose of the current project was to assess missed opportunities to identify metabolic syndrome in patients treated with second-generation antipsychotic medication in a community hospital's inpatient psychiatric unit between January 1 and December 31, 2020. Data on demographics, metabolic syndrome risk factors, body mass index, medications, related diagnoses, and primary care providers (PCPs) were collected via retrospective chart review of 194 patients. This project used a nonexperimental design and heterogenous nonrandom convenience sample.

Board Certification: A Role for the Nurse Educator.

Nurse educators are essential to the success of other nurses by supporting the attainment of professional competencies, knowledge, and continual development. In addition, board-certified nurse educators are also role models in lifelong learning. They are in an optimal position to promote and support others in pursuit of board certification.

Challenges of Treating Mental Health Issues in Correctional Settings.

The current article explores the challenges of correctional nursing and provides implications for nursing practice and advocacy for optimal outcomes for incarcerated individuals with mental illness. The role of the nurse as advocate and educator is discussed. Opportunities for changing the conversation that addresses the criminalization of mental illness, stigma, and social policy is presented as a path forward.

Championing person-first language: a call to psychiatric mental health nurses.

At the heart of recovery-oriented psychiatric mental health care are the dignity and respect of each person and the ways in which helping professionals convey a person's uniqueness, strengths, abilities, and needs. "Person-first language" is a form of linguistic expression relying on words that reflect awareness, a sense of dignity, and positive attitudes about people with disabilities. As such, person-first language places emphasis on the person first rather than the disability (e.