ABSTRACT
Objective:
to analyze the Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing discipline in the curricular structure of Brazilian undergraduate nursing programs.
Method:
an exploratory study with documentary analysis with data collected from the websites of institutions registered on the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research "Anísio Teixeira" website, via an instrument prepared for this study with information related to the institution, the disciplines offered in the area, the location of course(s) in the curriculum and workload. The data obtained were transferred to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 2.0 for performing descriptive statistics.
Results:
88.8% of the 738 registered courses are offered by private institutions, 72% of the institutions surveyed made the curriculums of the courses available on-line, and among these 47.2% had at least one discipline in the area, with a mean of 96 hours among private institutions and 142 hours in public ones, accounting for 2.4% and 3.5% of the total course workload, respectively.
Conclusion:
there is a predominance of private institutions offering undergraduate nursing programs, and some of these programs do not offer any disciplines related to Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. It was also noticed that there was no standardization regarding the nomenclature and the period for offering this discipline. We suggest further studies regarding how the theoretical and practical contents of this discipline are taught.
DESCRIPTORS:
Nursing education; Mental health; Teaching; Education; Curriculum