Mental health nurse education: a contemporary view in the debate between generic and specialist approaches

Many mental health nurses and academics believe that the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s standards of proficiency for registered nurses, published in 2018, have negatively affected mental health nurse education in the UK. Serious concerns had been raised before the implementation of these standards, but warnings were not heeded and many people think that the ‘dilution’ of mental health nurse education that they once feared has now become reality. This article presents some of the arguments made by mental health nurses and academics against a generic approach to education, or genericism. The authors suggest that there is now a debate about these issues in the profession, as demonstrated by the emergence of a grassroots movement called Mental Health Deserves Better, and that mental health nurses need to resist the loss of specialist education and look towards the future of the profession.