The notion that many undergraduate nursing students are not interested in a career in mental health is popular amongst undergraduate students. During my undergraduate years, I, just like most of my colleagues did find the theory course in mental health quite uninteresting and a bit abstract. It was not until my clinical placement when a clinical nurse from the mental health unit of the hospital had a review of the theory of mental health nursing, management of clinical aggression and de-escalation technique with us that the stigma and notion that mentally ill clients are always aggressive disappeared. This prompted my interest for a career in mental health nursing. In the course of my practice, I have heard times and times again students stating that they are …show more content…
2002 ; Ross et al. 2005, as cited in Happell 2008 ) . Australia like most other countries is experiencing a shortfall in the population of practicing nurses especially in specialty areas such as mental health (McCann, Clark & Lu 2010). In Australia, there have been government inquiries into the shortage of nurses as highlighted in the Australian Nursing Federation’s submission to the Health Workforce Productivity Commission in 2005 (Holmes, 2006). Even with a modest growth of 5% in the number of Australian nurses from 2001 and 2003, this is not enough to meet the nursing staff requirements and a review of the crisis situation by the Queensland’s health system found an acute nursing shortage, envisaging that the situation will worsen in the coming years (Holmes, 2006). Similar situations are found also in the United Kingdom and the USA (Holmes, 2006). Although shortage of nurses is becoming a great