BSN, PMHRN-BC , Doctoral (Current)
Iris Mayoral, BSN, PMHRN-BC, is currently enrolled in a Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program at Duke University and will subsequently begin the Psychiatric-Mental Health Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at Duke in the Summer of 2024. Through her DNP project, Ms. Mayoral is eager to improve access to mental health care services for underserved minority populations, especially via the adoption of integrated behavioral health models.
As a bilingual, Spanish-speaking board-certified psychiatric-mental health registered nurse in Los Angeles and daughter of immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, Ms. Mayoral is passionate about providing quality mental health care to ethnic-racial minorities. At UCLA Health, Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, she has demonstrated her commitment to advancing mental health care via direct patient care, involvement in several process improvement initiatives, collaborative evidence-based projects, and leadership roles such as serving as Chair of the New Knowledge, Innovations, and Improvements Council. In 2020, her team received a 1st Place Research Poster Award at the International Psychiatric Nurses Association Conference for the implementation of a hospital-wide electronic patient rounding system to improve patient safety.
Beyond the hospital setting, she has been an active member of APNA since she was selected as a 2014 APNA Board of Directions Scholar. At the 2020 APNA Virtual Conference, she presented her work on decreasing patient falls via the integration of a proactive toileting program in a geri-psychiatric unit’s fall prevention bundle. Ms. Mayoral is resourceful in promoting the delivery of recovery-based mental health care that takes patients unique cultural backgrounds, language preferences, physical, and cognitive abilities into account.
As a 2021 Nursing Informatics Fellow at UCLA Health, she developed and implemented the use of a patient-specific report that readily provides staff with this information to guide and stimulate therapeutic and meaningful interactions with patients who are on constant observation in a geriatric-medical psychiatric unit. In 2023, she was recognized by the Simms/Mann Foundation’s Off the Chart program, for a bias toward action, capacity for self-direction, originality and creative instincts, courageous and bold thinking, and the potential to achieve even more.