Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner Facts:
Psychiatric nurses provide care and comfort for sufferers of psychiatric illnesses and psychiatric nurse practitioners are among the nursing professionals that command the highest salaries in the nursing field. A nursing student becomes a psychiatric nurse through the usual channels – gaining an RN or Registered Nurse status by working on NCLEX qualifications and then spending some time working in the psychiatric specialty.
A psychiatric nurse practitioner takes a somewhat different route, adding 3-5 years of nursing training under a Masters in Nursing program that addresses his or her specialty – in this case psychiatric nursing. Psychiatric nurse practitioners are therefore among the most highly qualified members of the nursing profession, and their salaries and prestige reflect this fact. The usual duties of a psychiatric nurse practitioner include the assessment of a patient’s needs in terms of their psychological well-being, assessing the correct treatment and nursing plans, helping them cope by arranging their environment in a suitable manner and helping them through the difficult recovery process.
A psychiatric nurse practitioner therefore does much more than an ordinary psychiatric nurse, a fact reflected in their differing pay scales. For instance, an ordinary psychiatric nurse makes somewhere between $20 to $40 per hour, depending on work experience and qualifications. A psychiatric nurse practitioner, on the other hand, makes $75,000 to $85,000 a year, more than $20,000 a year more than an ordinary psychiatric nurse. A psychiatric nurse practitioner therefore works in one of the most demanding and rewarding specialties in the medical profession.
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