Naana Kwarteng, a nurse at Mississauga’s Credit Valley Hospital, remembers when she felt uneasy about a patient.
A few days later, the patient had a serious confrontation with her colleague, she said.
Kwarteng said she wished she had better tools to help her ask the right questions and the knowledge to provide the patient with the help he needed.
Better care could have been achieved by “being able to see through their (patients’) lens as opposed to looking at it as just through the diagnosis,” Kwarteng said.
To help meet that need, Humber launched a mental health for healthcare workers certificate program in the fall with the objective to help healthcare providers have a better awareness of the needs of mental health patients.
The program is run by the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Humber North. It announced last month a partnership with Durham College.
Program instructor Liselle Kuk Wah said the program started at Durham for nurses only, before partnering with Humber and including a wider scope of healthcare workers.
“So the whole purpose now is expansion, to make this accessible to all healthcare workers,” Kuk Wah said.
She said she helped develop three of the courses with Durham College.
Kuk Wah said the training offered helps healthcare workers learn the lingo.
“There is a language for mental health, diagnoses and assessments. So, to me, it goes that extra step further than a basic abnormal psychology course,” she said.
Kwarteng said knowing proper lingo for mental health could have helped her address her patients’ concerns without feeling uncomfortable or like she would offend them.
“There are definitely huge gaps,” she said.
Kuk Wah said she wanted healthcare workers to graduate, not just learning the basic words “like trauma-focused or competent.”
“Because when you work in this healthcare industry long enough, we become desensitized,” Kuk Wah said.
Kuk Wah said she simulated an assessment at Durham where the nurses listen to three minutes of audible hypothetical hallucinations while completing a word search of their choice.
She said it was a learning exercise to help nurses understand what patients go through.
“Because we come in with these preconceptions already,” she said. “It was so humbling for them.”
She said some of the nurses told her it was quite frightening. “We have the privilege of turning it off by button,” she said.
Kuk Wah said that when originally creating three of the courses at Durham, she focused on utilizing the concept of the mental discomfort of having behaviour conflicting with beliefs.
“We basically generate discomfort. Learning is coming through discomfort,” she said. “I really wanted to find a way where I can safely create discomfort and meanwhile help people build sensitivity.”
Brandy Taufeek is a former healthcare provider with experience in mental health and overdoses and is currently finishing her master’s in clinical counselling at Tyndale University in Toronto.
Taufeek said the best thing that a program like Humber’s could do is put people in uncomfortable situations in a learning environment.
“When you have no tools in your tool belt, you just start going off of what you think is the right decision,” Taufeek said.
Kuk Wah said healthcare workers, as the first point of contact, are important to give people that actual level of composure.
She said the goal is to curate that competence through understanding, knowledge in lingo and the ability to react in uncomfortable situations with confidence.
“They want to feel confident, right? Because we don't want to feel like we're screwing up all the time,” she said
According to the most recent 2022 Mental Health and Access to Care Survey by Statistics Canada, one in three of those who met diagnostic criteria reported unmet or partially met needs for mental health care services.
Taufeek said she noticed that when there is improper care, there is an increase in mental instability.
“The better quality healthcare, and the provision of care, the better outcome that you're going to receive,” Taufeek said.
She said mental health concerns are widespread in society, and as healthcare workers, they have to deal with them much more, so having those techniques and tools can help benefit the patient and the healthcare worker.
Valerie Grdisa, the CEO of the Canadian Nurses Association, said nursing is about the human response.
“So everything we do is centred around the mental health and well-being of that person,” she said. ”A human being is a biopsychosociocultural and spiritual person.”
The program is aligned with the Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing competencies.
Grdisa said people should always choose learning opportunities, and she is in support of advanced-training education.
“You can't go as deep as you want in an undergraduate curriculum or diploma-based program,” she said.
Grdisa said nurses who just do basic licensure education will struggle when meeting people with mental illness.
She said nurses should learn that mental illness is a biological condition that is impacted by social stressors, trauma and crisis.
“It is no different than someone having a cardiovascular incident, cancer or diabetes,” she said.
Kwarteng said being able to understand what's going on in the patient’s world, as opposed to a solely objective view, allows for better patient care.
