National Nurses Week 2025: Insights and reflections from a psychiatric nurse
National Nurses Week is an opportunity to express our profound gratitude and recognition for the invaluable contributions of nurses in healthcare and our communities. Nurses are the heart of the healthcare system, delivering essential care with compassion and dedication. We are commemorating this year’s National Nurses Week by profiling one of our psychiatric nurses, Makayla Dawson, a Registered Nurse Care Coordinator (RNCC) based at the Riverside Clinic at the University of Minnesota West bank campus with a series of questions to give us an insight into her healthcare career plus some tips for anyone wanting to get into this field.
Makayla's Journey
Makayla started her journey towards the nursing profession by working in a memory care unit of an assisted living facility in high school. It was there that she had an experience that inspired her, she explains, “One patient had significant dementia and her symptoms exhibited as really aggressive. I could work really well with her. That got me super interested in mental health and mental health nursing.” Although Makayla is now dedicated to psychiatric nursing, she shares that another reason she chose the nursing profession is that, “nursing gives you a lot of versatility and options.”
Makayla spent most of her nursing career in inpatient units, caring for children and adolescents. During this time, she worked with many kids who had conduct disorders. From that experience, Makayla learned that, “ultimately kids do well if they can. If they are not acting well, it’s because they lack a skill. No kid is inherently bad and all kids want to be good. That really stuck with me.” While transitioning into the adult world, or life in general, Makayla carries that insight. “There is a very small subset of people that are bad people, most of the time people are good but they were given bad circumstances that caused them to make bad choices. I think that’s the one thing that stuck with me.” Makayla really appreciated the experiences from her early career working with children, “These patients will stick with me forever. I really enjoyed working with them because it felt like the whole world was against them and those kinds of kids just need a couple of people to tell them that they are still a good kid.”
Recently, Makayla started her new job working with adults at the Riverside clinic. She really loves her current role, describing it as a “unicorn job”. Makayla shares, “For context, I was in inpatient for 7 years in child/adolescent units and then I moved to a leadership position at Children’s Minnesota opening their new mental health unit a couple years ago. That was a really great experience, but ultimately I have a young family and the grind of being a nurse manager was way too much for me and my family. I also really missed the patient care part of it. So now I get the best of all the worlds. I get to have a lot of direct patient care. I'm talking to patients all day, but it’s not the intensity of inpatient.”
A typical day
Makayla shares what a typical day is like in her current position, “Patients call for refills, they need a letter for something, or they have a question about their medication. We do also get crisis calls or side effects from medications. A lot of times people are calling to ask about one thing but then it turns into ten other things. The other big part of it is care coordination.” Makayla explains, “this person called and they have this thing going on, so now I call their case worker and have to call the county and their guardian, if they have a guardian, and kind of coordinate with all of those pieces to keep things running smoothly.”
Interest in the field
When talking about her interest in psychiatric nursing specifically, Makayla shares, “I really love that psych nursing is so grey. There is, in that sense, a lot more autonomy. With other types of nursing it’s very black and white. You see this symptom and you do this thing. There's obviously a lot of that still in psych nursing, but there's a lot of additional assessment that is vague. I kind of describe it as like right brain vs. left brain. You have to do a lot of right brain assessment.” Makayla explains further, “their tone of voice is telling me this and I have this gut feeling that this is going on so I’m going to say this thing. It’s a lot more grey. That’s my favorite part about it. It’s always interesting and there’s always new challenges depending on the patient. The patients don’t always look the same for the same diagnoses, the patients always look a bit different.”
Advice on becoming a nurse
We asked Makayla what advice she would offer to those considering a career in psychiatric nursing.Makayla shares that“especially in psych nursing, it is to really be invested in yourself. Not just self care as in bubble baths and candles, etc., but to be ready to be really reflective about your experiences and what you’re feeling and going through. Because this work takes a lot and we see really sad stuff and really hard stuff - stuff that’s going to hit you personally.” Makayla is very passionate about the importance of this in the nursing profession. She added, “it takes a lot more self reflection and digging and being honest with yourself on how these things impact us. Because it is not normal to see the things that we do and to hear about the things that we do and not be affected by it in some way, shape, or form.”
The future of psychiatric nursing
In the coming years, the future of psychiatric nursing looks promising. Makayla hopes that “it continues to evolve to be more like my current job specifically. It seems like we do so much preventive care and care coordination. I think that's what the mental health system in this country needs - more frequent outreach.” She elaborates on her approach to outreach, saying: “I noticed you didn’t fill your medications last month, are you still taking them? How are you doing? Do you need support? Can you not afford them? I have this resource to help get that handled for you. So I hope more places start doing what we do.” Together, this approach could make a difference to people’s lives.
We thank you, Makayla, and all our nurses, for your dedication, expertise, and willingness to go the extra mile to provide the best care possible!
