To provide quality mental health care, a comprehensive assessment is needed. Without knowing what a person’s strengths and needs are, or at least might be, health professionals are unable to provide appropriate help and support.
The emphasis on what happens between the nurse and the patient has to do with practice. It describes how to make assessments, what interventions are eff ective in the various everyday situations in which nurses fi nd themselves, and how to devel-
op structures and systems to support this work.Within psychosocial assessment, the recovery approach, which takes a holistic view, focuses on the patient’s perception of strengths, needs, and goals and recognizes that individuals have personal strengths and abilities as well as needs. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the process of mental health assessment within the holistic nursing approach. It emphasizes that assessment is inextricably linked to other parts of the nursing process to create coherent, comprehensive, and personalized care for the patient and discusses the major components of mental health assessment, such as mental status using medical terminology, psychosocial assessment, and risk assessment.