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SMART Goal SettingIssaiah WallaceChamberlain College of Essay

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SMART Goal Setting
Issaiah Wallace
Chamberlain College of Nursing

With 33 million Americans utilizing healthcare services as a means to manage mental health conditions and illnesses, adequate delivery of mental healthcare, treatment, and practice is becoming increasingly more important in the American landscape of wellness (SAMHSA, 2004a). The mental health system continues to be a challenging area of healthcare, due to: increased usage of coercion into treatment, diversity in care delivery systems, an unevolved quality measurement mechanism, and a drastically different business and marketplace infrastructure. These factors added to the, already, present stigma associated with mental health, culminates into an extremely …show more content…

The failure to identify proper alternative to restraint usage or to know when restraints are indicated could account for over 150 restraint-related deaths in America annually (SAMHSA, 2004b). Diagnostic failures, such as when to treat, how to treat, or even who needs treated, are impossible to quantify; but it is likely that this factor accounts for many deaths by suicide. Still, national, cultural, and social consequence can be much more staggering. Mental health conditions make up the number one cause for death and disability in American women and the second cause in American men. Mental health ailments account for a large amount of absenteeism in the workplace, as well as impaired thinking and judgment, and critical mistakes on the job. Child welfare is even impacted, with 48% of child welfare services investigations having clinical implications for mental health care problems. In facilities housing youth that await mental health services, 48% of these facilities report suicide attempts among their youth (U.S. House of Representatives, 2004). The social burden continues snowballing with an exponentially growing prison population, going from 601 persons in custody in 100,000 US residents in 1995 to one person in custody in 140 US residents (Harrison and Karberg, 2004). 16% of this population report a mental health condition or, at least, a history of a minimum of one night spent in an inpatient psychiatric unit (Mumola, 1999).

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