Study about the psychiatric cares of nursing developed in an internment unit of a university hospital of Rio de Janeiro. The study object was boarded with ethnographic approach, and the data interpreted for its approximation or distancing to the conceptual basis of the care and to the principles of the Psychiatric Reformation. In this period, some initiatives developed by the Direction of the Service of Nursing contributed to redirect the look and to act of the nursing team. The results indicate the coexistence of two dimensions of the care permeated by the ambient influences. The instrumental dimension showed a prominence of the sheltering assistant model, which overlaps itself of the transformations proposed. The expressive dimension indicated the valuation of the singularities of the customers and incorporated the diversity and the shelter of the professionals showing the demand most frequent of the clientele as basic for the transition of the mixing assistant model, to shelter and of rehabilitation, for a model based only on the psychosocial rehabilitation.
Nursing care; Psychiatric Nursing; Mental Health; Rehabilitation.