Title:Preparing nursing students to treat the whole patient

Primary and urgent care settings often focus on physical health over mental health. To fill the gap, the Berkley School of Nursing launched the Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) Post Graduate Certificate program.

“Georgetown is about treating the whole patient,” says Hilary Summers-Royce (G’13), a student in the PMHNP certificate program. “Cura personalis is helpful in thinking about the right questions to ask patients—not only about physical ailments, but also about their mental health.”

Summers-Royce is a family nurse practitioner with 12 years of experience. She transitioned from the business world into nursing, eventually working in an urgent care setting.

“Patients would come in for a sinus infection, but then score positively on depression screenings,” says Summers-Royce. “I felt like I lacked the knowledge to follow through. My goal now with the PMHNP program is to be able to dig in and provide the additional help and knowledge my patients need.”

The program aims to build a sustainable local network for mental health care in Washington, DC, and enrollment is limited to students who live in the Washington Metropolitan Area. The small cohort fosters a personalized learning environment where students rely on one another, and their faculty as they confront difficult topics.

The inaugural cohort of post-graduate nurses joined the program last fall and will complete their certifications in December. In a hybrid format, students learn through synchronous online class discussions; two on-campus clinical intensive programs with workshops and simulated, standardized patients; and community-based asynchronous learning and service.

Program faculty balance academic roles with clinical practice to educate students in whole person care through evaluation of symptoms and behaviors in the context of social and structural life stressors.

An applied learning assignment in the spring psychopharmacology course involved pairing each student with a volunteer clinical mentor to write a publishable manuscript, with a focus on clinical practice guidelines for treating a diagnosed mental disorder of interest. The manuscript, written by PMHNP student Dristi Basnet and co-authored by her clinical mentor, Management of Comorbid Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and Anxiety in Pediatric PMHNP Practice has been published in the July 2026 issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services.

Graduates of the PMHNP certificate program will be prepared to take the PMHNP certification exams offered by the American Nurses Credentialing Center and the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners.