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The importance of psychiatric mental health nursing to nursing practice cannot be overemphasized. The current shortage of nurses and increasing age of the nursing workforce will have a significant effect on psychiatric mental health nursing (PMHN) because only 3% of nursing graduates select PMHN as a clinical practice area (Hanrahan, 2009 ). To address this need, the clinical socialization of students to practica must be positive and meaningful. Immersion offers a sound methodology to capture students early in their developmental practice.
Early immersion experiences in nursing were introduced in the literature to describe practica in which students were exposed to another culture through an intense clinical placement, usually in another country (Kavanagh, 1998 ; St. Clair & McKenry, 1999 ). In these experiential practica, students lived with the host community members of another culture while learning about specific health issues, with the goal of developing cultural competence (Levine, 2009 ). More recently, immersion experiences have also been described in a variety of clinical nursing settings, including pediatrics (Demaree, 1999 ), community mental health (Davila, 2005 ; Jarosinski & Heinrich, 2010 ; Newson, 2009 ), geriatrics (Ottani, 2003 ), women's health (Wood & Atkins, 2006 ), and intensive care (Ballard, Trowbridge, & Caven, 2005 ). These reports not only document improvement in the understanding of cultural sensitivity or competence, but also express a greater student satisfaction with the learning experience. Currently, the literature reports no hospital-based psychiatric clinical immersion experiences, suggesting a gap in the literature. This article discusses a psychiatric immersion practicum for undergraduate baccalaureate nursing students on clinical rotation at a state psychiatric hospital.
Background
Clinical immersion is defined as a brief, structured, intense nursing practicum where the entire focus is in a particular clinical setting without the distraction of other academic classes. If culture is broadly defined as "the characteristic features of everyday existence shared by people in a place or time" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2010 ), immersion in a clinical setting may be considered a cultural experience. Psychiatric mental health nursing entails a unique language, an emphasis on communication rather than technical skills, and a unique form of relating to each other and valuing experiences (Patterson, Curtis, & Reid, 2008 ). Therefore,...