The unpopularity of mental health/psychiatry settings among nursing students: A systematic review

In every population and part of the world, mental health needs are great and on the rise. Through their training and their vast field of expertise, nurses are an important lever for addressing the issue of accessibility in these care settings. While the increase in the number of new nursing graduates should have helped this issue, recent data show a sharp increase in the shortage of nurses in these care settings. This systematic review (n=40) using the CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycArticles, and Scopus databases aims to explore why psychiatric and mental health care settings are unpopular with the new generation of nurses. Guided by Parse’s “Humanbecoming” theory, this review identifies three major themes: (1) nursing students’ perspectives on mental health issues, (2) the influences of educational interventions on these perspectives, and (3) the factors facilitating and inhibiting a career in these care settings for newly qualified nurses. These results enable a better understanding of what can affect the recruitment of newly qualified nurses in mental health/psychiatry, while proposing various levers of intervention to specifically address this issue.