Attribution 4.0 License SJRR.MS.ID.000504. Abstract The job description of the nurses includes the care, monitoring, supervision and counseling of patients and other sick persons, as well as keeping documentation and performing health care. Depending on the workplace (hospitals, health centers, ambulance, home of the retired), the nursing job can also include prevention, rehabilitation, health education and health promotion. Most nurses mainly deal with nursing care, and what they share is a systematic approach to addressing health problems within their scope. Nurses monitoring the psychological and physical condition of their patients and so they come to important data needed for further treatment. Keywords: Nurse; Nursing; Patient; Forensics Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews Volume 1-Issue 1 Citation: Sinisa Franjic. Role of the Nurse in Forensic Psychiatry. Sci J Research & Rev. 1(1): 2018. SJRR.MS.ID.000504. DOI: 10.33552/SJRR.2018.01.000504. Page 2 of 3 psychiatry, linked together the mad, the bad and the dim. However, during the First World War and its aftermath such an underlying assumption began to falter. In the forensic field, there emerged a resistance to the old eugenic ideas of degeneracy, which accounted for criminality in terms of an inherited disposition to bad conduct. This was replaced by an increasing interest in environmental or psychological explanations for law-breaking. Since that time, psychiatric experts have played a major role in identifying and explaining criminal conduct. And once there was that shift away from bio-genetic determinism, then this opened up questions, still pertinent today, about psychological explanations. Given that the latter contain elements of determinism as well as assumptions about human agency, then case by case the balance allotted to each is always open to consideration and varying perspectives. The norms of the criminal justice system permit this ambiguity. For example, mental illness may be considered as a reason to exculpate criminal action in a context, in which usually intention, and therefore intentionality, is the focus of interest to judges and juries. Mental illness is one of the major health issues facing every community [5]. It is the leading cause of disability in North America and Europe, and costs the United States more than half a trillion dollars per year in treatment and other expenses. Mental disorders are associated with smoking, reduced activity, poor diet, obesity, and hypertension, and also contribute to unintentional and intentional injury. Mental disorders reduce average life expectancy, in some cases (involving substance use disorders, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, and bipolar mood disorder) by the same amount as does smoking more than 20 cigarettes a day. Clearly, there is “no health without mental health.” Approximately 20% of American adults (about 45 million people) have diagnosable mental disorders during a given year, and about 5% of adults in the United States have serious mental illness, that is, illness that interferes with some aspect of social functioning. Only 38% of those diagnosed with a mental disorder receive treatment. Some of these people require only minimal counseling, followed by regular attendance of supportive self-help group meetings to remain in recovery, while others suffer repeated episodes of disabling mental illness. These individuals require more frequent medical treatment and more significant community support. Finally, there are the most severely disturbed individuals, who require repeated hospitalization. Forensic psychiatry works at the interface of law and medicine, involves unique problems of boundaries and dual agency in the professional–client relationship, and presents uncertainties and conflicting opinions about its accountability to society [6]. Consequently, legal issues, the range of stakeholders, and the impact of psychiatric medicine on individual autonomy and public safety pose complex challenges for forensic professionals. These require alertness to boundaries and a more robust and dynamic professional ethics. Nursing and forensics Nurses providing patient care in acute care settings care for the young and the old, the sick and the injured [7]. And they must do it without compromising valuable forensic evidence, jeopardizing the police investigation that may ensue, or reducing the patients’ chances of getting justice in the court system if they seek it later. With the incorporation of forensic nursing into the hospital, the scope of the practice of nursing has been broadened. A nurse trained in forensics is one who can recognize traumatic conditions and evidence, document their presence, collect and preserve shortlived findings, and understand how the patient’s illness or injury happened. When patients who are victims of assault, abuse, violent crimes, or even motor vehicle collisions present to the hospital, their wounds, clothing, and bodies may be ripe with forensic evidence. This forensic evidence can be used to connect perpetrators with their victims, to protect innocent parties, to help determine who was the driver versus the passenger in an automobile crash, and to ensure forensic questions regarding injury causation can be answered. Unfortunately, forensic evidence is usually fragile (a dusting of soot, blood spatter patterns, biologic fluids, wound characteristics), and forensic evidence can be