Experiences of giving psychotropic medications to psychiatric inpatients as perceived by psychiatric nurses

The purposes of this study were to (a) explore and describe psychiatric nurses' experiences of giving psychotropic medications to inpatients and (b) to explore what nurses do when there is disagreement with a physician's prescribed pharmacologic treatment. Through the use of a semistructured interview, 12 nurses described their experiences of giving psychotropic medications to psychiatric inpatients. They also described how they manage situations when they did not agree with a physician's prescribed pharmacologic treatment. From their work experiences, nurses described situations where they felt the patient benefitted and situations where the patient did not benefit from the prescribed medication. The nurses were able to describe productive ways of managing their disagreements with the physician's prescribed pharmacologic treatment, as well as nonproductive methods were described. From these nursing experiences of psychotropic medication management, information was generated to assist the profession and the individual nurses to act as patient advocates and better manage conflict.