LEARNING OUTCOME AND OBJECTIVES:  Upon completion of this course, you will have increased your knowledge of recognizing and responding to signs, symptoms, and behaviors of mental health disorders in patients being seen for physical health conditions. Specific learning objectives to address potential knowledge gaps include:

• Identify concerns healthcare professionals express about caring for patients with physical health conditions who also exhibit mental disorders.
• Summarize primary mental health disorders, including their signs, symptoms, patient behaviors, and treatment modalities.
• Describe effective strategies for responding to and caring for patients with mental disorders.

INTRODUCTION

Acute care settings are complex environments offering a range of challenges for healthcare staff. These challenges are exacerbated when patients present with a comorbid mental illness. Close to one billion people worldwide have some form of mental illness, including 51.5 million in the United States. Of these, 36 million are estimated to be hospitalized each year. Nearly 1 in 3 people with a long-term physical health condition also has a mental health condition (Monaghan & Cos, 2021; Perry & Dilks, 2022).

These numbers make it easy to see that no matter what the role or setting, healthcare professionals will encounter patients who exhibit signs, symptoms, and behaviors indicating mental illness, and will be involved in the provision of care for both physical and mental illness.

Healthcare clinicians are expected to provide holistic care involving the whole person, which includes physical, mental, spiritual, and social needs, and is rooted in the understanding that all of these aspects affect overall health. Being unwell in one aspect affects the others. This means that the responsibility for providing mental health care needs to be shared across the multidisciplinary workforce, requiring skilled clinicians to deliver both physical and mental health services in diverse clinical settings.

Physical and mental health education, training, and services, however, have historically functioned independently from each other, and as a result those caring for patients with physical disorders report a lack of training and feeling inadequately prepared to care for their patients’ mental health care needs. In addition, they report a lack of access to appropriate training and support in the workplace (McInnes et al., 2022)