The rationale and guiding principles to design a psychiatric curriculum for primary care nurses of India

BACKGROUND: The National Mental Health Survey reports a huge treatment gap for all mental disorders. There is an acute shortage of mental health professionals in India. Hence, there is a dire need to support task-shift interventions by nurses in providing non-pharmacological interventions for persons suffering from mental health issues. The traditional psychiatric nursing curriculum emphasizes nurses’ knowledge and skills rather than their competency in providing mental health care. We designed an innovative, digitally driven, modular-based primary care psychiatry program for nurses (PCPP-N) to incorporate mental health with physical health and emphasize redesigning nursing practice. In this paper, we discuss the rationale and guiding principles behind designing the curriculum of PCPP-N. DISCUSSION: The PCPP-N program is based on nine guiding principles to provide skill-based, pragmatic, and feasible modules of a higher collaborative care quotient (CCQ) and translational quotient (TQ) that are essential for upskilling primary care nurses. In this program, nurses are trained through telemedicine-based ‘on-consultation training’ augmented with collaborative video consultations. A tele-psychiatrist/tele-psychiatric nurse will demonstrate how to screen, identify, and plan treatment for patients with psychiatric disorders from patients coming for general medical care using the manual Clinical Schedules of Primary care psychiatry Nursing (CSP-N). The CSP-N manual includes a screener, simplified diagnosing guidelines relevant for nurses and primary care settings, nursing management, pharmacological management, and related side effects, counseling, and follow-up guidelines. This program helps the nurses in identifying the most commonly prevalent adult psychiatric disorders presenting to primary care. CONCLUSION: This PCPN curriculum contains pragmatic modules with higher CCQ and TQ. This curriculum is dynamic as the learning is interactive. Upskilling primary care nurses in integrating mental health with physical health may reduce the mental health burden. Further, the policymakers and administrators plan to integrate mental health along with physical health in national health programs.