Patients with schizophrenia suffer from a variety of mental and emotional symptoms that can potentially cause a stressful and dangerous environment for the nurses that are assigned to take care of them. However, while the nurses have to be well versed and knowledgeable in the safety procedures of the QSEN Institute and their individual institutions, they must also understand the dangers that schizophrenic patients experience themselves. For one, schizophrenic patients often do not have a reliable sense of time and do not know how to maintain a positive amount of productivity in their everyday lives.

This includes habitually eating and smoking, not being able to complete daily tasks and not knowing how to interact socially (Nurse Care for Schizophrenia Patients, 2008). In addition to their potentially harmful emotional and physiological conditions, the medications that schizophrenic patients often have to take can have some very extreme side effects. These can include (but are not limited to): sedation, hyper salivation, cardiovascular respiratory dysregulation, and Parkinsonism.

In order to safely care for schizophrenic patients, should practice two of the safety skills and attitudes that are listed in the QSEN Competencies that are published by the QSEN Institute (n.d.). The skill that should be practiced by nurses is demonstrating the effective use of strategies to reduce the risk of self-harm to oneself or others; while a desired attitude that nurses should possess is “an appreciation of the physical and cognitive limits of human performance” (QSEN Competencies, n.d.).

By practicing these skills and attitudes, nurses can understand the emotional and physical thresholds that their schizophrenic patients can endure and can safely care for them and practice interventions accordingly. This can lead to personalized care for each individual patient that does not have to constantly involve heavy medicating and other similar methods.