American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA)

Education and information - the Association provides online continuing nursing education opportunities to members and nonmembers via their "elearning center". For the year ended december 31, 2023, Apna offered 586 sessions. These sessions were available through publications, webinars, webcasts and podcasts. In order to facilitate continuing nursing education and to promote psychiatric-mental health nursing, the Association administered a scholarship program to attend the annual conference for 30 nursing students (graduate and undergraduate/pre-licensure) in 2023.

Membership services - expenses associated with member services provides for the maintenance of the membership database and the presence of a national network that enables members to communicate with each other in the development of standards and positions to advance the discipline of psychiatric-mental health nursing within the field of mental illness and substance use disorders.

Conferences - the Association holds two national conferences each year: the clinical psychopharmacology institute ("cpi") conference in june and the annual conference in october. Cpi focuses on complex clinical issues addressing the most current practices and insights on clinical psychopharmacology. The annual conference is the premiere event for Psychiatric nursing and is held in a new location each year to encourage regional participation. The Association recognizes outstanding contributions to the Association and Psychiatric nursing through the presentation of its annual awards. On march 11, 2020, the world health organization declared the spread of coronavirus (covid-19) to be a public health emergency of international concern. Due to travel and group gathering restrictions associated with the covid-19 pandemic, cpi and the annual conference were converted to virtual events in 2020 and 2021. A hybrid model was introduced for both conferences during 2022, and continued in 2023.