Having realized the dream of pursuing the Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) postgraduate degree was one of the most fulfilling realities ever. It marked the start of a career in a nursing specialty in which the author would find a way to help the community that they come from. For the author, this achievement heralded the beginning of fully giving back to the community that invested so heavily in them. Choosing a nursing specialty after being accepted for the MSN course was however not one of the easiest tasks. This is because according to the Consensus Model, there are four distinct and recognized advanced practice registered nurse or APRN roles which are the certified nurse practitioner (NP), the certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA), the certified nurse midwife (CNM), and the clinical nurse specialist or CNS (Registered Nursing, 2019). This paper is about the choice of the nursing specialty made by the author and the difficulties encountered in making the choice.
The Choice of Nursing Specialty
Within the MSN program, the nursing specialty chosen by the author was that of a certified nurse practitioner (CNP). To be specific, it was to be a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner or PMHNP. This was not an easy choice to make as the author had to wrestle with the other urge to choose a different nurse practitioner sub-specialty. The choice of PMHNP for the author was motivated by the fact that they had observed since their childhood that mental health services were not readily available for members of their community. To be specific, there were no clinicians at the grassroots community level who were specifically trained to offer primary health care geared towards mental health. Many physicians did not want to work at the community level and only preferred concentrating their services in the big cities. As such, when the opportunity arose the author grasped it and set out to be one of the primary health care providers envisaged by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 to be catering for the extra Americans brought within coverage (Kominski et al., 2017).
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