Abstract
Preparing baccalaureate nursing students to deliver care to an increasingly complex patient population is an ongoing challenge for nursing educators. Wanting to provide their students with a more holistic approach to patient care, undergraduate psychiatric-mental health nursing course faculty created a clinical rotation to address the needs of psychiatric patients who also had 1 or more medical comorbidities. In this article, we describe a pilot project in which students volunteered to participate in a 24-hour clinical experience focused on assessing and addressing the mental health needs of patients admitted to a medical or surgical clinical unit. Evaluation of this approach indicates that the predominant clinical and educational model of specialized healthcare undermines a single course approach to integrated care.