Stepping to stability and fall prevention in adult psychiatric patients.

Fall prevention is a major area of concern in inpatient settings. This article reports on the feasibility of implementing a daily exercise program that features line dancing to promote stability, balance, and flexibility in adult psychiatric patients and describes the impact of that program. Six hundred sixty-five patient charts drawn from before and after the practice change were reviewed.

Slow the ticking clock of toxicity.

Time is a crucial element in preventing the most severe consequences of overdose.

Flying under the radar: engagement and retention of depressed low-income mothers in a mental health intervention.

A randomized trial of in-home psychotherapy for depressive symptoms that targeted low-income mothers of infants and toddlers used innovative design features to reduce stigma and enhance acceptability. Despite these features, advanced practice psychiatric mental health nurses used specialized, relationship-based strategies to engage and retain these high-risk mothers in the intervention. Data revealed that the nurses needed to diligently maintain contact, provide encouragement, use empathy for rapid assessment and response, and control the intensity of the relationship-based contacts in order to retain mothers.

Instrumental inputs: moving the interpersonal theory of nursing into practice.

Instrumental inputs, the units of energy that are passed from nurse to client in therapeutic encounters, stimulate the client to develop new competencies. This article develops the concept, part of the Interpersonal Theory of Nursing, and discusses its use in 2 clinical trials of an advanced practice psychiatric-mental health intervention with high-risk mothers with significant depressive symptoms. Systematic documentation of instrumental inputs in the strategic interactions between advanced practice psychiatric-mental health nurses and clients has provided cumulative empirical examples that are presented.