What is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner? A Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) is a highly skilled and extensively trained nurse practitioner that has specialized in the mental health field through a Master’s Degree in nursing. They are board certified and legally able to assess, diagnose and prescribe medication for the myriad of mental health disorders, under the close supervision of a psychiatrist. At the end of their education and training, these PMHNP’s have more than 8 years under their belts devoted to mental health.
Why a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner instead of a Psychiatrist? In our beautiful Palo Alto/Menlo Park bubble, there is a shortage of highly skilled and available psychiatrists to treat the growing number of patients seeking mental health services. Our PMHNP can treat the same mental health patient population with a significantly reduced wait time to our patients, often at a lower cost than most psychiatrists in the area. Mental health can sometimes require immediate attention and waiting for months on end to be seen can cause unnecessary complications. When we seek help for something that feels as though it can be bigger than we are prepared to deal with, time is of the essence. In our effort to provide comparable care with significantly reduced wait times and a much more economical price point, while still having Stanford/Emory trained psychiatrists look over each and every case, we truly believe our practice model is accessible and beneficial to those needing rapid response.
Drs. Khan and Chen still see patients in their own private practice and this can always be an option that is requested.
How did we select our Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioners? In our goal to provide the highest level of care, we invest a considerable amount of time and effort into only picking the best PMHNP's we can find. We hire recruiters, have multiple phone interviews, in-person interviews, phone calls with their previous supervisors and rigorous situation based questions to make the cut. Less than 5% of candidates that we connect with make the cut to a final interview. This provides us with the comfort that our team is cutting edge and able to provide the highest level of care possible for our patients who have entrusted us with the privilege of helping them.