Healthcare Program: Open Counseling

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Healthcare Program: OpenCounseling
General Information
The primary barriers that prevent individuals from consulting their mental health issues include the stigma and the lack of financial capacity to fund their health needs. This is why OpenCounseling aims to provide low-cost counseling to maintain, protect, and improve Americans’ mental health. It offers a comprehensive approach to counseling through telemedicine. This is done with the help of partner organizations with similar missions and visions. The affiliates provide the services while the website offers instructions and conducts the interviews. The revenue is gathered from the affiliate organizations used to fund the project (OpenCounseling, n.d.).
The program aims to reach all the fifty states in the United States and provide an accessible page that can be easily navigated by the clients who want to avail counseling services via partner organizations. Furthermore, it aims to cover the American Public Mental Health System in the future (Open Counseling, n.d.).
Target Population
The target group comprises any person who suffers from mental illnesses or those at risk of incurring one.
Role of the Nurse in Programs for Mental Health
Design
Nurses have a specialized field in mental health, which is called psychiatric nursing. This branch allows the nurses to be educated on how to deal with patients with mental health issues through help them improve their quality of life (Smith, 2019).
Psychiatric nurses are the permanent members of the healthcare team, and they are tasked to assist or primarily examine, diagnose, and treat patients (Smith, 2019). In this program, their role can be divided into two: administrative and clinical. For the administrative role, the nurses can be the first health providers who shall face the clients. They can design the interview and match the clients to the organizations or providers. For the clinical role, the psychiatric nurse can design the flow of counseling sessions and call for conferences to design algorithms in the prescription of psychiatric drugs and the use of various types of therapy. Furthermore, the psychiatric nurses can modify aspects of previously applicable therapies during the face-to-face setting, but not during teleconsultation.
As an Advocate
Approximately 450 million people are faced with mental and behavioral problems worldwide, and the treatments, such as therapies and medications, are not accessible to most people, thereby worsening the situation (WHO, n.d.). As advocates, psychiatric nurses can provide such services with the minimum amount of payment or free to curb the alarming situation. The nurse's role is to encourage individuals to avail free or sponsored programs to promote better mental health. The nurses can specialize in psychiatric nursing to know the screening, diagnosis, and various forms of treatment for the patients. They shall also be trained to work with psychiatrists and psychologists for a comprehensive approach to the patient (Vanderbilt School of Nursing, 2021). Because the nurses are knowledg...